To be clear, I don't condone that behaviour, but asking football fans to respect these sorts of people (yes, British Monarchs included) is just asking for trouble.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
Given the AI discussions, perhaps a more Minority Report style pre-crime future?
I think I'm unusual in liking that 'arrest before you do it' idea in MR.
"Pete's doing a great job," Trump told reporters on Monday. "Everybody's happy with him."
"Are you bringing up Signal again? I thought they gave that up two weeks ago. It's the same old stuff from the media," he said. "Try finding something new," he said.
Looks like NPR have been sold a pup. If the Trump administration were smart they would leak fake stories and then can play the FAKE NEWS media angle. But they aren't.....
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
Not much of a Protestant are you?
It is a Catholic but Reformed church. In the culture wars we are united against a common enemy, the militant atheist secular woke left
Since when are atheists militant? I have had Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door. I have had Mormons come to my door. I get leaflets from the local Baptist Church and from the local Gospel Hall. Never had an atheist leaflet or an atheist come to my door.
Some Christians still get upset about the agnostic bus adverts from 2009.
God, buses. I remember buses.
You ‘ad buses?
{prybars lid off a double case of Château de Chasselas}
Oh, could never afford to actually go on them. Just had to hike nine miles across t'hills, barefoot, to see them as they passed.
Lively critical discussion is vital to civic life and democratic participation. Unfortunately, on this occasion much of it has been fuelled by misunderstanding, wishful thinking and distortion.
It has been said, for example, that competitive sex-segregated sports and single-sex facilities in workplaces, schools and services can operate on the basis of self-identified gender rather than biological sex. This was false before the Supreme Court judgment, and it is even more false now. Indeed if it were true, the appeal would not have been won.
Single-sex facilities are mandatory in workplaces and schools. The judgment has put it beyond doubt that the Equality Act, with other legislation, requires these to be provided according to biological sex.
Akua Reindorf KC is a commissioner for the Equality and Human Rights Commission
Notably she did not sign off as "writing in a personal capacity", so we can reasonably assume this is the EHRC position, despite all the wishful thinking being spread by peddlers of misinformation.
Yes, I agree that's what the EHRC's position has long been and it's what they submitted to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court agreed with them.
Actually the EHRC submitted "the GRA changes sex" and therefore we need to change the law because this causes problems for lesbians, gays & bisexual people " - the Supreme Court said "no, the law is clear" and you had it wrong:
Previously the prevailing interpretation had been that a “woman” for the purposes of the act was either a biological woman or a trans woman (biologically male) who held a Gender Recognition Certificate.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission intervened in the appeal, arguing that this interpretation caused intractable problems for the rights of women and of lesbian, gay and bisexual people. In its 88-page judgment, the court agreed. The commission’s position was that solving this problem was a matter for parliament. On this the court disagreed, and instead did the job itself.
The Supreme Court can't change the law, they can only determine what the law is. In this case the GRA 2004 and EA 2011 seem to conflict. The SC decided to solve that problem by basically saying that the GRA section 9(1) should be ignored in this context (I know that's a gross simplification). It is for Parliament to sort it out, I don't think this Parliament or the next will but I'm hopeful that it'll happen one day.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
What’s your strike rate in the big votes thing? The one last July hasn’t necessarily turned out to your (or many others’) advantage.
The main thing I’ve noticed about Paris since I first visited 25 years ago is that ordinary people (and the kinds of services that support them), have been squeezed out of the inner arrondisements.
Like most global cities, it has steadily become a pastiche of itself.
This is my takeaway: I don't think countries like France or the UK are broken, but they are becoming increasingly difficult for an ordinary person to live a pleasant live within.
A family of four don't get much change out of £100 now for a trip to a destination for a day out. And a takeaway? Probably £50.
So many people can't begin to afford that.
Western Europe is in steep relative decline. Of course it is declining from a very high place - surely the nicest place to live these last decades - nonetheless: declining
The combo of mass migration, Islamification, globalisation, multiculturalism, etc etc, has been catastrophic for so many cities, from Sweden to Britain to Germany, and on to France and Italy
The fact I feel far safer in the large cities of Central Asia than I do in similar cities in Western Europe is tragic. Also, less litter and graffiti, and so on
The relative decline of rich countries is inevitable and healthy. It's about other places catching up. About wealth and power (globally) being more fairly distributed. If Western Europe had pulled up the drawbridge, rejected immigration, multiculturalism, globalisation, all those things that make you shudder, the decline would likely have been steeper.
If relative decline is healthy, and would have been faster if we had rejected immigration, multiculturalism and globalisation, then shouldn't you be in favour of rejecting them so that we get to a more equitable global distribution faster instead of cheating by stealing talented people from the rest of the world?
London, from my vantage point, hasn’t even been in relative decline let alone absolute decline. It’s thriving, rich, and a sought after destination for international capital. Compare that with its nadir in the 70s and 80s when outmigration took its population down by almost a third.
The absolute decline is in left behind post-industrial regions. We all know that. And those regions are predominantly white or at most bi-cultural, because they are not attractive to incomers. So the idea that multiculturalism is bringing down the West is somewhat belied by the stats.
It's an idea primarily fuelled by racism not economics.
Neither is it based on real crime statistics. London was quite a dangerous place when I lived there in the Eighties.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
Which peers? According to this data the UK is safer than France:
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
Which peers? According to this data the UK is safer than France:
The U.S. has given an ultimatum to Ukraime: recognize Crimea as Russian, abandon any attempt to join NATO, and agree to a neutral zone around Zaporizhzhia NPP (to be managed by the U.S.).
Ukraine has until the London meeting tomorrow to respond.
The proposal offers nothing to Ukraine — it’s just a list of things the US will take to Putin to see if he can be appeased.
Lively critical discussion is vital to civic life and democratic participation. Unfortunately, on this occasion much of it has been fuelled by misunderstanding, wishful thinking and distortion.
It has been said, for example, that competitive sex-segregated sports and single-sex facilities in workplaces, schools and services can operate on the basis of self-identified gender rather than biological sex. This was false before the Supreme Court judgment, and it is even more false now. Indeed if it were true, the appeal would not have been won.
Single-sex facilities are mandatory in workplaces and schools. The judgment has put it beyond doubt that the Equality Act, with other legislation, requires these to be provided according to biological sex.
Akua Reindorf KC is a commissioner for the Equality and Human Rights Commission
Notably she did not sign off as "writing in a personal capacity", so we can reasonably assume this is the EHRC position, despite all the wishful thinking being spread by peddlers of misinformation.
Yes, I agree that's what the EHRC's position has long been and it's what they submitted to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court agreed with them.
Actually the EHRC submitted "the GRA changes sex" and therefore we need to change the law because this causes problems for lesbians, gays & bisexual people " - the Supreme Court said "no, the law is clear" and you had it wrong:
Previously the prevailing interpretation had been that a “woman” for the purposes of the act was either a biological woman or a trans woman (biologically male) who held a Gender Recognition Certificate.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission intervened in the appeal, arguing that this interpretation caused intractable problems for the rights of women and of lesbian, gay and bisexual people. In its 88-page judgment, the court agreed. The commission’s position was that solving this problem was a matter for parliament. On this the court disagreed, and instead did the job itself.
The Supreme Court can't change the law, they can only determine what the law is. In this case the GRA 2004 and EA 2011 seem to conflict. The SC decided to solve that problem by basically saying that the GRA section 9(1) should be ignored in this context (I know that's a gross simplification). It is for Parliament to sort it out, I don't think this Parliament or the next will but I'm hopeful that it'll happen one day.
If you want the GRA to change "sex" you need to work out how to avoid the negative effects that will have on other protected characteristics such as sexual orientation, maternity rights and religious belief - I think the original Equality Act does a good job of balancing those potentially conflicting rights.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
I'm all for prosecuting crimes, the sentences need to be tougher. Too many people steal and they get non-custodial sentences then go on to steal more. Once they get a taste of the good life of living with their hands in someone else's pocket you think they're going to give it up for a life of virtue and working for a living? No, let's have real consequences and a proper deterrent so that people don't start down that path in the first place.
Say what you want about Asia being oppressive to live in, I'd take that over what we have which is a criminal free for all and people living with their hands in everyone else's pocket.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
On the bright side, though, we would have been spared Oxford PPE graduates.
There's an argument about the death penalty but a much bigger argument about law and order or if you prefer crime and punishment.
We can't be lectured to about this by the Conservatives who oversaw the closing and selling off of operational Police stations as well as an abject failure to do anything about improving prison capacity. Both were and remain for me unforgiveable. I see my local Police struggling to keep up with low level petty anti social opportunistic criminality such as mobile phone theft.
Counter intuitively, I would argue many parts of London are "safer" than they were - places like Brixton, Dalston and Haggerston are not what they were in the 70s and 80s.
As a long time Londoner, the only advice I've ever followed is "keep your wits about you and don't make yourself a victim".
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
But they didn’t, most wealthy Kings, aristocrats and merchants preferred to spend money on building castles, raising armies and wine, banquets and women
Trinity College, Cambridge, was founded by Henry VIII. King's College by Henry VI. King;s Hall by Edward II. Michaelhouse by a chancellor of the exchequer. Some other colleges were also formed by other non-clerics. So whilst some were also founded by the church, I'd argue you are very wrong. For Cambridge at least...
Henry VIII ascended the throne 516 years ago, today
It's also the 107th anniversary of the Red Baron being shot down and killed
And the 2,777th anniversary of the founding of Rome by Romulus
50 years ago today, the North Vietnamese fought and won their last major pitched battle against South Vietnam.
Interesting development: China and Egypt have launched their first-ever joint air force drill, “Eagles of Civilization 2025,” at an Egyptian airbase. The exercise kicked off on April 19 and will run through early May.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
I'm all for prosecuting crimes, the sentences need to be tougher. Too many people steal and they get non-custodial sentences then go on to steal more. Once they get a taste of the good life of living with their hands in someone else's pocket you think they're going to give it up for a life of virtue and working for a living? No, let's have real consequences and a proper deterrent so that people don't start down that path in the first place.
Say what you want about Asia being oppressive to live in, I'd take that over what we have which is a criminal free for all and people living with their hands in everyone else's pocket.
Interesting development: China and Egypt have launched their first-ever joint air force drill, “Eagles of Civilization 2025,” at an Egyptian airbase. The exercise kicked off on April 19 and will run through early May.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
But they didn’t, most wealthy Kings, aristocrats and merchants preferred to spend money on building castles, raising armies and wine, banquets and women
Trinity College, Cambridge, was founded by Henry VIII. King's College by Henry VI. King;s Hall by Edward II. Michaelhouse by a chancellor of the exchequer. Some other colleges were also formed by other non-clerics. So whilst some were also founded by the church, I'd argue you are very wrong. For Cambridge at least...
Henry VIII ascended the throne 516 years ago, today
It's also the 107th anniversary of the Red Baron being shot down and killed
And the 2,777th anniversary of the founding of Rome by Romulus
50 years ago today, the North Vietnamese fought and won their last major pitched battle against South Vietnam.
That was the one where it was just the North v the South.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
The US cracks down on even the smallest crimes and some states like North Carolina have as low reoffending rates and effective prison work and rehabilitation rates as Norway
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
On the bright side, though, we would have been spared Oxford PPE graduates.
Until the twentieth century there was no PPE, indeed for the early centuries of Oxbridge the main courses were Latin, Law and Theology
They say its going to be the biggliest funeral ever. Everybody says I should give the Eulogy....I would give the best Eulogy, I am the best at it, everybody says so.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
Which peers? According to this data the UK is safer than France:
Well, on that same index (others are available*) the UK has a higher crime rate than: Italy, Ukraine, Greece, Ireland, Albania (yes, Albania), Malta, Moldova, N Macedonia, Germany, Serbia, Montenegro, Latvia, Bulgaria, Spain, Luxembourg, Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, Norway, Cyprus, Portugal, Slovakia, Poland, Austria, Czechia, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Croatia, Georgia, Iceland, Switzerland, Slovenia, Estonia, Monaco, Armenia and Andorra.
Everywhere in Europe, in fact, except Sweden, Belgium and France.
The main thing I’ve noticed about Paris since I first visited 25 years ago is that ordinary people (and the kinds of services that support them), have been squeezed out of the inner arrondisements.
Like most global cities, it has steadily become a pastiche of itself.
This is my takeaway: I don't think countries like France or the UK are broken, but they are becoming increasingly difficult for an ordinary person to live a pleasant live within.
A family of four don't get much change out of £100 now for a trip to a destination for a day out. And a takeaway? Probably £50.
So many people can't begin to afford that.
Western Europe is in steep relative decline. Of course it is declining from a very high place - surely the nicest place to live these last decades - nonetheless: declining
The combo of mass migration, Islamification, globalisation, multiculturalism, etc etc, has been catastrophic for so many cities, from Sweden to Britain to Germany, and on to France and Italy
The fact I feel far safer in the large cities of Central Asia than I do in similar cities in Western Europe is tragic. Also, less litter and graffiti, and so on
The relative decline of rich countries is inevitable and healthy. It's about other places catching up. About wealth and power (globally) being more fairly distributed. If Western Europe had pulled up the drawbridge, rejected immigration, multiculturalism, globalisation, all those things that make you shudder, the decline would likely have been steeper.
Western Europe is in relative decline, partly for the reasons you say. Fair point. But quite a few Western European cities are now in ABSOLUTE decline. For the reasons I say
It is neither inevitable nor healthy. It is right that the entire world advances and that the poorest in today's world live in comfort undreamt of by their distant ancestors. But there is no universal law that countries that have been wealthy and powerful must grow weaker and less powerful. There is no cosmic concept of 'fairness' that says that because we had it good, our descendants should have it shit. The concept is absurd.
Long-time conservative columnist George Will describes himself as an "amiable, low-voltage atheist". (Which, for many years he found compatible with membership in the Episcopalian church.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Will
(For the record: I would describe myself as an agnostic -- and a "cultural Christian".)
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
The US cracks down on even the smallest crimes and some states like North Carolina have as low reoffending rates and effective prison work and rehabilitation rates as Norway
Indeed, and it's the halfway house liberal states like California that have huge amounts of crime because they are lax on sentencing and actually arresting criminals.
States that enforce the law and have tough sentencing have got lower crime rates, lower rates of drug addiction and are better places to live. Crime is one of the major reasons so many Californians are moving to Texas and what's also surprising is that as they move to Texas they become more conservative. When they get away from the horrible leftism in those states it's almost like a reset.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
The US cracks down on even the smallest crimes (except if you are white) and some states like North Carolina have as low reoffending rates and effective prison work and rehabilitation rates as Norway
Long-time conservative columnist George Will describes himself as an "amiable, low-voltage atheist". (Which, for many years he found compatible with membership in the Episcopalian church.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Will
(For the record: I would describe myself as an agnostic -- and a "cultural Christian".)
If @HYUFD were ever to point his double-barrelled shot gun at me, and scream "Choose one of the world's religions! Now!", it would probably be Christianity.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
They say its going to be the biggliest funeral ever. Everybody says I should give the Eulogy....I would give the best Eulogy, I am the best at it, everybody says so.
Plus a chance for Vatican City to get that amazing US trade deal it's been crying out for.
In my opinion, it was in large part their shared Christian faith that led George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice that led them to propose the PEPFAR program, which has saved an estimated 25 million lives so far.
(My apologies for not beginning with a trigger notice, knowing how sensitive some are about any kind words about GWB.)
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
Yes, I do assume that, because that is what the evidence points to. Other organisations in the Middle Ages were far less capable of husbanding and improving their resources than the churches.
As for your second sentence, that is simply not correct. On the contrary, the Catholic Church along with the Orthodox Church and indeed the libraries of the colleges of Islam is why we have any classical works at all. You will notice all are religious. There were in fact very limited restrictions on copying or studying such works in educational or monastic settings. It was later that Protestants claimed there had been not because there had but because of their campaign against Catholicism. (As an aside, this is what Galileo got into trouble for - not heliocentrism per se, but for teaching it outside a university setting when he had agreed he wouldn't without more evidence.)
I was not, particularly, aiming at you in the last paragraph (although I do think your remark was born of ignorance, which is why I put forward the actuality for you to learn from) - although I can see on reflection why you might have taken it as such, it was not intended to be personal. There are certainly others on this thread and this subject who are spouting nonsense.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
The abolition of the monasteries was our controlled experiment. Some of the new landowners did take care of the destitute, but in general, the position of the poor worsened. That's why, after 1540, the laws against beggars and vagrancy became increasingly savage, because their numbers were increasing. That only changed with the Poor Law of 1601.
@ydoethur is correct. Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
In my opinion, it was in large part their shared Christian faith that led George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice that led them to propose the PEPFAR program, which has saved an estimated 25 million lives so far.
(My apologies for not beginning with a trigger notice, knowing how sensitive some are about any kind words about GWB.)
The worst feature of Donald Trump and JD Vance is they make us nostalgic for Bush and Cheney.
They say its going to be the biggliest funeral ever. Everybody says I should give the Eulogy....I would give the best Eulogy, I am the best at it, everybody says so.
The crowd will be smaller than MY inauguration of course.
I can understand the very low rates of done failed states, but the India and Bangladesh numbers are remarkable.
"Record 46% of newly-elected Lok Sabha MPs facing criminal cases: Study
"251 of the 543 newly elected members [of Parliament] have criminal cases registered against them and 27 of them have been convicted, revealed an analysis done by the Association of Democratic Reforms."
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
Yes, I do assume that, because that is what the evidence points to. As for your second sentence, that is simply false. On the contrary, the Catholic Church along with the Orthodox Church and indeed the libraries of the colleges of Islam is why we have any classical works at all. You will notice all are religious.
There were in fact very limited restrictions on copying or studying such works in educational or monastic settings. It was later that Protestants claimed there had been not because there had but because of their campaign against Catholicism. (As an aside, this is what Galileo got into trouble for - not heliocentrism per se, but for teaching it outside a university setting when he had agreed he wouldn't without more evidence.)
(Snip)
Are you saying the church did not restrict access to knowledge? And restrict the 'wrong' knowledge? Censorship, banning books, etc? Galileo might disagree, as might many others. How much did that hold back society and science?
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
Given the AI discussions, perhaps a more Minority Report style pre-crime future?
I think I'm unusual in liking that 'arrest before you do it' idea in MR.
That’s because you think you aren’t on The List to be arrested.
“Right sir. You are under arrest”
“But I haven’t done anything!”
“Under the 2036 Dangerous Professions Act, you will be guilty of Retired Accountancy in the first degrees.”
“There’s no such law! And it’s only 2026!”
“There will be…. Now come quietly, sir? Or are you going to resist? {happy gleam in eye, as he hefts truncheon”
I can understand the very low rates of done failed states, but the India and Bangladesh numbers are remarkable.
"Record 46% of newly-elected Lok Sabha MPs facing criminal cases: Study
"251 of the 543 newly elected members [of Parliament] have criminal cases registered against them and 27 of them have been convicted, revealed an analysis done by the Association of Democratic Reforms."
Will be interesting to compare the records of all the predicted new Reform MPs, currently 20% of Reform MPs have been to prison and another 20% are accused of harassment and don’t let us get started on POTUS,,,
"Militant atheist secular woke left" ? Well, that covers a multitude of sins and presumably sinners. I suppose it's possible to be atheist and secular and be on the "right" of politics whatever the terms "left" and "right" mean nowadays other than terms of abuse.
I'm not sure everyone is "happy" to see innocents killed abroad or unborn children killed in the womb but that's why we have political parties and movements. If someone wants to stand on a platform of anti-abortion and pro-death penalty, fine, go ahead, join the democratic process but restoration of the death penalty has been debated in the Commons and always been soundly defeated and while the abortion rules have been tightened, there's never been a serious attempt to instigate a complete ban.
The latest Canadian polling from our old friends Angus Reid has the Liberal lead down from six to five while Research Co's fortnightly poll has the Liberal lead down from eight to five (CPC +2, LPC -1).
I'd really like some regional polling - the sub samples in the Federal polls are really small and probably aren;t telling the whole story. The Liberals seem to be leading in Ontario and to have improved their position in British Columbia while the CPC has strengthened its grip on Alberta but a lot of salt needed.
In Australia the final Leaders' Debate coincices with the start of advance polling tomorrow (already today over there). The latest seat projection off the Freshwater Strategy poll which had the LNP Coalition and Labor tied at 50% in the 2PP polling has the Coalition on 69, Labor on 68, the Greens on 1 and 12 Independents. Given the vagaries of electorate polling, it's impossible to be too confident in those numbers even at this stage.
Looks like the Teals will have the balance of power in Australia
I thought that said the Teslas will have the balance of power!
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
The US cracks down on even the smallest crimes and some states like North Carolina have as low reoffending rates and effective prison work and rehabilitation rates as Norway
North Carolina has a homicide rate 6x Northern Ireland, 7x England and Wales and 8x Scotland and 1.5x the US Average. I don't think we should be taking any lessons from them.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
Given the AI discussions, perhaps a more Minority Report style pre-crime future?
I think I'm unusual in liking that 'arrest before you do it' idea in MR.
That’s because you think you aren’t on The List to be arrested.
“Right sir. You are under arrest”
“But I haven’t done anything!”
“Under the 2036 Dangerous Professions Act, you will be guilty of Retired Accountancy in the first degrees.”
“There’s no such law! And it’s only 2026!”
“There will be…. Now come quietly, sir? Or are you going to resist? {happy gleam in eye, as he hefts truncheon”
And, timely, this link just appeared for me:
"Can AI spot a killer? Inside the Government’s murder prediction tool"
For HYFUD (and others here) this reminder: American states (and cities) vary greatly in their crime policies.
Example: "Port of Seattle Police arrested Branson Albert, 37, of Auburn, last week on seven outstanding warrants related to car theft, identity fraud, weapons, and drug charges. Albert appeared in King County Superior Court on Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to the new cases.
(I haven't seen an explanation of what he did with the cars. In this area, cars are sometimes stolen to be used as battering rams to break into stores, especially those that sell marijuana.)
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
The abolition of the monasteries was our controlled experiment. Some of the new landowners did take care of the destitute, but in general, the position of the poor worsened. That's why, after 1540, the laws against beggars and vagrancy became increasingly savage, because their numbers were increasing. That only changed with the Poor Law of 1601.
@ydoethur is correct. Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
War was quite a priority for churches as well, wasn't it? The Duke of Normandy went into battle with a Papal banner given him by the pope. Then there were the crusades...
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
The US cracks down on even the smallest crimes and some states like North Carolina have as low reoffending rates and effective prison work and rehabilitation rates as Norway
North Carolina has a homicide rate 6x Northern Ireland, 7x England and Wales and 8x Scotland and 1.5x the US Average. I don't think we should be taking any lessons from them.
The main thing I’ve noticed about Paris since I first visited 25 years ago is that ordinary people (and the kinds of services that support them), have been squeezed out of the inner arrondisements.
Like most global cities, it has steadily become a pastiche of itself.
This is my takeaway: I don't think countries like France or the UK are broken, but they are becoming increasingly difficult for an ordinary person to live a pleasant live within.
A family of four don't get much change out of £100 now for a trip to a destination for a day out. And a takeaway? Probably £50.
So many people can't begin to afford that.
Western Europe is in steep relative decline. Of course it is declining from a very high place - surely the nicest place to live these last decades - nonetheless: declining
The combo of mass migration, Islamification, globalisation, multiculturalism, etc etc, has been catastrophic for so many cities, from Sweden to Britain to Germany, and on to France and Italy
The fact I feel far safer in the large cities of Central Asia than I do in similar cities in Western Europe is tragic. Also, less litter and graffiti, and so on
The relative decline of rich countries is inevitable and healthy. It's about other places catching up. About wealth and power (globally) being more fairly distributed. If Western Europe had pulled up the drawbridge, rejected immigration, multiculturalism, globalisation, all those things that make you shudder, the decline would likely have been steeper.
Western Europe is in relative decline, partly for the reasons you say. Fair point. But quite a few Western European cities are now in ABSOLUTE decline. For the reasons I say
It is neither inevitable nor healthy. It is right that the entire world advances and that the poorest in today's world live in comfort undreamt of by their distant ancestors. But there is no universal law that countries that have been wealthy and powerful must grow weaker and less powerful. There is no cosmic concept of 'fairness' that says that because we had it good, our descendants should have it shit. The concept is absurd.
You don't seem to get what 'relative' means. I start off ten times richer than you. I double my wealth. You quadruple yours. I'm now twice as rich as I was but I'm only five times richer than you. That's me in relative decline. Which is as it should be. The rich should always be in relative decline. The poor in relative advancement. And neither can happen without the other.
"Stocks fell sharply on Monday after President Donald Trump renewed his attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 972 points, or 2.5%. The S&P 500 dropped 2.4%. The Nasdaq Composite was down 2.6%.
The indexes were even lower earlier in the session but retraced some ground. Still, the Dow is on track for its worst April since 1932, according to Dow Jones Market Data. And the S&P 500 has fallen more than 1.5% for the sixth time this month, the most number of days since June 2022, when it also fell 1.5% six times.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
Shocking stuff indeed.
I feel like not enough people when thinking about history consider, aside from any other moral issues, war is bloody expensive, and kings throughout history often seemed to be skint and begging for money (or taking it from anyone they can by force) even before wartime. The ones carefully managing the treasury seem to be an exception.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
Shocking stuff indeed.
I feel like not enough people when thinking about history consider, aside from any other moral issues, war is bloody expensive, and kings throughout history often seemed to be skint and begging for money (or taking it from anyone they can by force) even before wartime. The ones carefully managing the treasury seem to be an exception.
Yes but the most famous early Kings were those who won battles like Henry V and Edward III rather than those who prudently managed the finances like Henry VII.
The most infamous were those who lost wars like Edward II
For HYFUD (and others here) this reminder: American states (and cities) vary greatly in their crime policies.
Example: "Port of Seattle Police arrested Branson Albert, 37, of Auburn, last week on seven outstanding warrants related to car theft, identity fraud, weapons, and drug charges. Albert appeared in King County Superior Court on Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to the new cases.
(I haven't seen an explanation of what he did with the cars. In this area, cars are sometimes stolen to be used as battering rams to break into stores, especially those that sell marijuana.)
Prosecutors noted in one of the new cases, has had 33 warrants in the last ten years, and prior convictions for identity theft, possession of stolen property, possession of stolen vehicle, identity theft, harassment, obstructing a law enforcement officer, negligent driving, obstructing a law enforcement officer, two DUIs, three instances of driving without a license, , assault, vehicle trespass, and vehicle prowling.
The main thing I’ve noticed about Paris since I first visited 25 years ago is that ordinary people (and the kinds of services that support them), have been squeezed out of the inner arrondisements.
Like most global cities, it has steadily become a pastiche of itself.
This is my takeaway: I don't think countries like France or the UK are broken, but they are becoming increasingly difficult for an ordinary person to live a pleasant live within.
A family of four don't get much change out of £100 now for a trip to a destination for a day out. And a takeaway? Probably £50.
So many people can't begin to afford that.
Western Europe is in steep relative decline. Of course it is declining from a very high place - surely the nicest place to live these last decades - nonetheless: declining
The combo of mass migration, Islamification, globalisation, multiculturalism, etc etc, has been catastrophic for so many cities, from Sweden to Britain to Germany, and on to France and Italy
The fact I feel far safer in the large cities of Central Asia than I do in similar cities in Western Europe is tragic. Also, less litter and graffiti, and so on
The relative decline of rich countries is inevitable and healthy. It's about other places catching up. About wealth and power (globally) being more fairly distributed. If Western Europe had pulled up the drawbridge, rejected immigration, multiculturalism, globalisation, all those things that make you shudder, the decline would likely have been steeper.
Western Europe is in relative decline, partly for the reasons you say. Fair point. But quite a few Western European cities are now in ABSOLUTE decline. For the reasons I say
It is neither inevitable nor healthy. It is right that the entire world advances and that the poorest in today's world live in comfort undreamt of by their distant ancestors. But there is no universal law that countries that have been wealthy and powerful must grow weaker and less powerful. There is no cosmic concept of 'fairness' that says that because we had it good, our descendants should have it shit. The concept is absurd.
You don't seem to get what 'relative' means. I start off ten times richer than you. I double my wealth. You quadruple yours. I'm now twice as rich as I was but I'm only five times richer than you. That's me in relative decline. Which is as it should be. The rich should always be in relative decline. The poor in relative advancement. And neither can happen without the other.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
A big failure of the coalition was in Justice.
I'm not a believer that money solves everything, but the whole criminal justice system feels like an area where a (relatively) small amount of money would go a long way.
Instead politicians usually compete to be toughest, and create new offences of sometimes dubious utility, while the actual administration of policing and justice goes to hell.
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
I think the shame of this and a hundred other acts of pathetic cowardice will live with them for the rest of their days and the history books will not be kind.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
The US cracks down on even the smallest crimes and some states like North Carolina have as low reoffending rates and effective prison work and rehabilitation rates as Norway
North Carolina has a homicide rate 6x Northern Ireland, 7x England and Wales and 8x Scotland and 1.5x the US Average. I don't think we should be taking any lessons from them.
If you lock everyone up forever you get a 0% recidivism rate, but it clearly doesn't make people safer, the homicide rate is 8.1 per 100,000 people per year, England/Wales is 1.1, Scotland 0.9 and Northern Ireland 1.4.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
A big failure of the coalition was in Justice.
I'm not a believer that money solves everything, but the whole criminal justice system feels like an area where a (relatively) small amount of money would go a long way.
Instead politicians usually compete to be toughest, and create new offences of sometimes dubious utility, while the actual administration of policing and justice goes to hell.
Remember that Tessy May threw a wobbler when Cameron and Osborne wanted to hire Bill Bratton, famed for his focus on tackling low level crime in NYC.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
Shocking stuff indeed.
I feel like not enough people when thinking about history consider, aside from any other moral issues, war is bloody expensive, and kings throughout history often seemed to be skint and begging for money (or taking it from anyone they can by force) even before wartime. The ones carefully managing the treasury seem to be an exception.
Yes but the most famous early Kings were those who won battles like Henry V and Edward III rather than those who prudently managed the finances like Henry VII.
The most infamous were those who lost wars like Edward II
Well sure, if you are just weak or useless your own subordinates will take you down or undermine you, never mind foreign actors. Simply neglecting the ability to wage war was probably not an option for most.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
The abolition of the monasteries was our controlled experiment. Some of the new landowners did take care of the destitute, but in general, the position of the poor worsened. That's why, after 1540, the laws against beggars and vagrancy became increasingly savage, because their numbers were increasing. That only changed with the Poor Law of 1601.
@ydoethur is correct. Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
War was quite a priority for churches as well, wasn't it? The Duke of Normandy went into battle with a Papal banner given him by the pope. Then there were the crusades...
War was one function among many for the Church. War was by far, the most important function for medieval, and early modern governments. Success in war, was how you were judged by your peers. That's what made monarchs like Henry VII so unusual. The Church did a lot of the civil functions that would be a performed by a modern government.
Worth it to own them libs and incorporate Canada as the 51st state.
Actually I don't recall seeing many reports about Trump and Canada in the last week or so, has he gotten bored or did someone finally get through to him that he is helping left wing parties the world over?
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
The US cracks down on even the smallest crimes and some states like North Carolina have as low reoffending rates and effective prison work and rehabilitation rates as Norway
North Carolina has a homicide rate 6x Northern Ireland, 7x England and Wales and 8x Scotland and 1.5x the US Average. I don't think we should be taking any lessons from them.
If you lock everyone up forever you get a 0% recidivism rate, but it clearly doesn't make people safer, the homicide rate is 8.1 per 100,000 people per year, England/Wales is 1.1, Scotland 0.9 and Northern Ireland 1.4.
They don’t lock up non murderers forever or execute them, most of those in those figures are not murderers yet released and don’t reoffend.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
The abolition of the monasteries was our controlled experiment. Some of the new landowners did take care of the destitute, but in general, the position of the poor worsened. That's why, after 1540, the laws against beggars and vagrancy became increasingly savage, because their numbers were increasing. That only changed with the Poor Law of 1601.
@ydoethur is correct. Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
War was quite a priority for churches as well, wasn't it? The Duke of Normandy went into battle with a Papal banner given him by the pope. Then there were the crusades...
War was one function among many for the Church. War was by far, the most important function for medieval, and early modern governments. Success in war, was how you were judged by your peers. That's what made monarchs like Henry VII so unusual.
Yes battles in Medieval times were like Premier League football matches or the Super Bowl now.
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
I think the shame of this and a hundred other acts of pathetic cowardice will live with them for the rest of their days and the history books will not be kind.
You would like to think so, but probably not.
MAGA voters will continue to elect numpties who hate the same people they do
If voters made politicians experience consequences for their actions we would never hear from Nigel Fucking Farage ever again
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
The abolition of the monasteries was our controlled experiment. Some of the new landowners did take care of the destitute, but in general, the position of the poor worsened. That's why, after 1540, the laws against beggars and vagrancy became increasingly savage, because their numbers were increasing. That only changed with the Poor Law of 1601.
@ydoethur is correct. Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
War was quite a priority for churches as well, wasn't it? The Duke of Normandy went into battle with a Papal banner given him by the pope. Then there were the crusades...
War was one function among many for the Church. War was by far, the most important function for medieval, and early modern governments. Success in war, was how you were judged by your peers. That's what made monarchs like Henry VII so unusual.
Well he did the hard part first to get the throne.
It always seemed interesting to me how powerful Henry VIII was able to become when you consider how fractious things were before the dynasty came into power, and considering how religiously fraught the time was. It's not a period I was all that interested in (more of a Civil War guy). Not that there were no rebellions or arguments over succession ever again, clearly there was, but at a casual look the nature of it seems very different after then.
In my opinion, it was in large part their shared Christian faith that led George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice that led them to propose the PEPFAR program, which has saved an estimated 25 million lives so far.
(My apologies for not beginning with a trigger notice, knowing how sensitive some are about any kind words about GWB.)
The worst feature of Donald Trump and JD Vance is they make us nostalgic for Bush and Cheney.
Discuss.
Dick Cheney literally shot a guy in the face and is still less dangerous than JD Vance.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
Shocking stuff indeed.
I feel like not enough people when thinking about history consider, aside from any other moral issues, war is bloody expensive, and kings throughout history often seemed to be skint and begging for money (or taking it from anyone they can by force) even before wartime. The ones carefully managing the treasury seem to be an exception.
War was ruinously expensive (it still is), but would overwhelm the resources of any medieval State. The growth of centralised State power, in the Sixteenth century Europe, primarily meant the growth in the size of armies, and the need for governments to control them, in place of the nobility.
When governments got windfalls, like the proceeds of monastic lands, or the silver of Potosi, it went on hiring soldiers, and building warships.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
The US cracks down on even the smallest crimes and some states like North Carolina have as low reoffending rates and effective prison work and rehabilitation rates as Norway
North Carolina has a homicide rate 6x Northern Ireland, 7x England and Wales and 8x Scotland and 1.5x the US Average. I don't think we should be taking any lessons from them.
If you lock everyone up forever you get a 0% recidivism rate, but it clearly doesn't make people safer, the homicide rate is 8.1 per 100,000 people per year, England/Wales is 1.1, Scotland 0.9 and Northern Ireland 1.4.
And Texas was mentioned earlier as a nice safe haven for people fleeing scary California.
Texas homicide rate 6.7 per 100k, California 5.7 (in line with US average).
UK 1.15. Germany 0.8. Italy 0.5. Holy See 0 (until yesterday?).
Oh and nice safe strict SE Asia: Thailand 4.8, Philippines 4.3, Burma 3.8, Cambodia 1.8, Vietnam 1.5.
Police forces will now be braced for further potential flashpoints this weekend, with gatherings planned in towns and cities from Darlington to Southampton.
Large rallies are also expected in York, Coventry, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Cheltenham, Cambridge, Derby, Oxford and Bristol, and further protests are planned for next month, culminating in a London demonstration on May 25.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
The abolition of the monasteries was our controlled experiment. Some of the new landowners did take care of the destitute, but in general, the position of the poor worsened. That's why, after 1540, the laws against beggars and vagrancy became increasingly savage, because their numbers were increasing. That only changed with the Poor Law of 1601.
@ydoethur is correct. Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
War was quite a priority for churches as well, wasn't it? The Duke of Normandy went into battle with a Papal banner given him by the pope. Then there were the crusades...
War was one function among many for the Church. War was by far, the most important function for medieval, and early modern governments. Success in war, was how you were judged by your peers. That's what made monarchs like Henry VII so unusual.
Yes battles in Medieval times were like Premier League football matches or the Super Bowl now.
With Henry Vth a medieval Sir Alex Ferguson
A typical medieval army would be 5-10,000 men, with an equivalent number of camp followers (who essentially, performed a similar function to modern support soldiers).
By the mid-sixteenth century, you're seeing army sizes rocket, up to as many as 30-35,000. The consequences of the latter marching through a district, and foraging for food and firewood, would be devastating for the locals.
I didn't realise this, it makes the decisions over this privileges even more crazy...
He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London's Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.
Who makes the decision? I bet it isn't the front line staff.
It is, they'll consider if a prisoner is eligible to be moved to another prison, then it gets passed up on the chain for approval or rejection.
The reality is the prison estate isn't fit for purpose to deal with these types of prisoners.
We may need to have a UK supermax with specially trained officers.
Or execute them
So you'd be okay with executing Lucy Letby?
Dunno. Edge case
But in a society which is
1 happy to bomb and drone innocent people abroad
2 happy to kill unborn children in the womb
3 happy - it seems - to encourage sad or old people to commit suicide and to facilitate their self murder
Then I find our outrage at the death penalty both effete and illogical
I remember chatting to a Singaporean student. Junkie off his face wandering down the street. I said it was a shame. He said "You should just execute him".
Unhappily, I find myself increasingly pro-death penalty. I believe we should have a referendum on it, and in that referendum there’s a good chance I’d vote Yes
This, as I say, doesn’t make me happy. It’s a bleak evolution, but it may be necessary
On the upside I also believe technology is developing so fast we will - in a few years - be able to surveil and restrict lifers so intensely the noose won’t be needed (tho the villains may ask for it)
It will be solitary confinement enforced by robots that feed you and exercise you and never talk to you. The android guards will be invulnerable to attack. That will be your hideous life sentence until you die
On balance I'd still vote no, but I would vote for much tougher sentencing, even for trivial crime and instant deportation with no chance of appeal for any foreign criminals, even for trivial crimes such as fare evasion on trains etc... we just don't need people like that in the country. They add nothing positive to the nation.
I think the only crime I would bring the death penalty back for is treason with a definition that would catch the likes of Shamina Begum and the other terrorists who went overseas to fight for a foreign enemy and commit acts of terrorism against innocent people.
The UK is seen as a soft target by terrorists and foreign criminals, we should do something about it.
No no no. For decades politicians in this country have decided the solution to crime is tougher sentences. Just like in America. Rather than actually catching criminals.
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
The US cracks down on even the smallest crimes and some states like North Carolina have as low reoffending rates and effective prison work and rehabilitation rates as Norway
North Carolina has a homicide rate 6x Northern Ireland, 7x England and Wales and 8x Scotland and 1.5x the US Average. I don't think we should be taking any lessons from them.
If you lock everyone up forever you get a 0% recidivism rate, but it clearly doesn't make people safer, the homicide rate is 8.1 per 100,000 people per year, England/Wales is 1.1, Scotland 0.9 and Northern Ireland 1.4.
They don’t lock up non murderers forever or execute them, most of those in those figures are not murderers yet released and don’t reoffend.
That is the most important figure
On no conceivable measure is the USA a case study in how to have low crime rates.
For once in our lives can we just look closer to home for ideas?
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
Shocking stuff indeed.
I feel like not enough people when thinking about history consider, aside from any other moral issues, war is bloody expensive, and kings throughout history often seemed to be skint and begging for money (or taking it from anyone they can by force) even before wartime. The ones carefully managing the treasury seem to be an exception.
War was ruinously expensive (it still is), but would overwhelm the resources of any medieval State. The growth of centralised State power, in the Sixteenth century Europe, primarily meant the growth in the size of armies, and the need for governments to control them, in place of the nobility.
When governments got windfalls, like the proceeds of monastic lands, or the silver of Potosi, it went on hiring soldiers, and building warships.
I always have a great admiration for the administrative and financial nous of evil overlords in fantasy now, their logistical ability to pull together enormous world conquering forces or domineering states is overlooked because, well, they're evil. We need more Palpatine's and Lord Ruler's.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
The abolition of the monasteries was our controlled experiment. Some of the new landowners did take care of the destitute, but in general, the position of the poor worsened. That's why, after 1540, the laws against beggars and vagrancy became increasingly savage, because their numbers were increasing. That only changed with the Poor Law of 1601.
@ydoethur is correct. Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
War was quite a priority for churches as well, wasn't it? The Duke of Normandy went into battle with a Papal banner given him by the pope. Then there were the crusades...
War was one function among many for the Church. War was by far, the most important function for medieval, and early modern governments. Success in war, was how you were judged by your peers. That's what made monarchs like Henry VII so unusual. The Church did a lot of the civil functions that would be a performed by a modern government.
Am I missing something? Didn’t Henry VII steal the crown in a cheeky little invasion and battle?
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
The abolition of the monasteries was our controlled experiment. Some of the new landowners did take care of the destitute, but in general, the position of the poor worsened. That's why, after 1540, the laws against beggars and vagrancy became increasingly savage, because their numbers were increasing. That only changed with the Poor Law of 1601.
@ydoethur is correct. Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
War was quite a priority for churches as well, wasn't it? The Duke of Normandy went into battle with a Papal banner given him by the pope. Then there were the crusades...
War was one function among many for the Church. War was by far, the most important function for medieval, and early modern governments. Success in war, was how you were judged by your peers. That's what made monarchs like Henry VII so unusual.
Well he did the hard part first to get the throne.
It always seemed interesting to me how powerful Henry VIII was able to become when you consider how fractious things were before the dynasty came into power, and considering how religiously fraught the time was. It's not a period I was all that interested in (more of a Civil War guy). Not that there were no rebellions or arguments over succession ever again, clearly there was, but at a casual look the nature of it seems very different after then.
Worth it to own them libs and incorporate Canada as the 51st state.
Actually I don't recall seeing many reports about Trump and Canada in the last week or so, has he gotten bored or did someone finally get through to him that he is helping left wing parties the world over?
I do wonder if Trump has deliberately gone quiet on Canada for exactly that reason.
Starmer take note and get your nose out of that arse.
Police forces will now be braced for further potential flashpoints this weekend, with gatherings planned in towns and cities from Darlington to Southampton.
Large rallies are also expected in York, Coventry, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Cheltenham, Cambridge, Derby, Oxford and Bristol, and further protests are planned for next month, culminating in a London demonstration on May 25.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
The abolition of the monasteries was our controlled experiment. Some of the new landowners did take care of the destitute, but in general, the position of the poor worsened. That's why, after 1540, the laws against beggars and vagrancy became increasingly savage, because their numbers were increasing. That only changed with the Poor Law of 1601.
@ydoethur is correct. Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
War was quite a priority for churches as well, wasn't it? The Duke of Normandy went into battle with a Papal banner given him by the pope. Then there were the crusades...
War was one function among many for the Church. War was by far, the most important function for medieval, and early modern governments. Success in war, was how you were judged by your peers. That's what made monarchs like Henry VII so unusual. The Church did a lot of the civil functions that would be a performed by a modern government.
Am I missing something? Didn’t Henry VII steal the crown in a cheeky little invasion and battle?
He did, but then lived in peace with his neighbours, and left an ample treasury on his death.
The main thing I’ve noticed about Paris since I first visited 25 years ago is that ordinary people (and the kinds of services that support them), have been squeezed out of the inner arrondisements.
Like most global cities, it has steadily become a pastiche of itself.
This is my takeaway: I don't think countries like France or the UK are broken, but they are becoming increasingly difficult for an ordinary person to live a pleasant live within.
A family of four don't get much change out of £100 now for a trip to a destination for a day out. And a takeaway? Probably £50.
So many people can't begin to afford that.
Western Europe is in steep relative decline. Of course it is declining from a very high place - surely the nicest place to live these last decades - nonetheless: declining
The combo of mass migration, Islamification, globalisation, multiculturalism, etc etc, has been catastrophic for so many cities, from Sweden to Britain to Germany, and on to France and Italy
The fact I feel far safer in the large cities of Central Asia than I do in similar cities in Western Europe is tragic. Also, less litter and graffiti, and so on
The relative decline of rich countries is inevitable and healthy. It's about other places catching up. About wealth and power (globally) being more fairly distributed. If Western Europe had pulled up the drawbridge, rejected immigration, multiculturalism, globalisation, all those things that make you shudder, the decline would likely have been steeper.
Western Europe is in relative decline, partly for the reasons you say. Fair point. But quite a few Western European cities are now in ABSOLUTE decline. For the reasons I say
It is neither inevitable nor healthy. It is right that the entire world advances and that the poorest in today's world live in comfort undreamt of by their distant ancestors. But there is no universal law that countries that have been wealthy and powerful must grow weaker and less powerful. There is no cosmic concept of 'fairness' that says that because we had it good, our descendants should have it shit. The concept is absurd.
You don't seem to get what 'relative' means. I start off ten times richer than you. I double my wealth. You quadruple yours. I'm now twice as rich as I was but I'm only five times richer than you. That's me in relative decline. Which is as it should be. The rich should always be in relative decline. The poor in relative advancement. And neither can happen without the other.
You've got to remember that in MAGA/Mercantilist thinking such advances cannot occur without some other group losing out.
As long as you remember that it's fairly easy to understand their decision making.
Watching Albanese and Macron eulogising the Pope, Starmer's evil, heretical, godless silence is deafening!
For those who commiserate, my heart goes out to them on the death of the Pope.
As an individual human, just perhaps.
But there’s no institution on the planet that has inflicted more war and death and misery and abuse upon humanity than the Catholic Church.
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church. As do charities, orphanages, food banks, homeless shelters etc.
Your comment is symptomatic of why militant woke leftist secular atheists must be defeated at all costs or western civilisation will be destroyed. You hate our culture, our heritage, the traditional family you name it
I always thought IanB2 was a nice liberal chap with a dog, so am surprised to learn that he's a woke leftie secular atheist who must be defeated before he destroys western civilisation. God knows what you'd make of a proper leftie socialist like me.
I would prefer a Catholic socialist like John McDonnell to either of you
Skipping back a few comments HY, is this not an odd defence of the Catholic church?
Much of our greatest art, our oldest cathedrals, many ancient universities, schools and hospitals have their origins in the Catholic Church.
My reading of this is that the Catholic church historically accrued such power that it could delimit acceptable cultural expression (art), institute forms of slavery (to build cathedrals) and stymie free expression (at universities).
(Apologies for the Vance-like crassness of the timing of my comment for anyone mourning the Pope).
Without the Catholic church Oxford and Cambridge universities would never have been founded, most of our best cathedrals never built and Michaelangelo not got most of his commissions
Without the Church, Oxford and Cambridge probably wouldn't have wasted their intellectual talents for centuries training priests or have thwarted the establishment of other universities. Nor would they have strangled intellectual thought in this country by crushing anybody who showed any signs of doubting their spurious fairy tales.
As they wouldn’t have been founded in the first place they wouldn’t have been doing anything.
The church did not generate money; it took it. If they had not got that excess wealth, someone else would, and may well have spent it in similar, or even better, ways.
It did generate money, on a considerable scale, through its use of landed estates which were developed using their own resources of labour (yes, monks) to support economic activity including substantial building works.
In particular, there was a considerable amount of development in the wool trade owing to the work of religious foundations.
And since it tended to spend its money on useful things - architecture, land improvements, managing archives, and indeed also education and welfare - rather than building big armies to go and kill lots of French people, however worthy TSE may find that, it seems unlikely that others would have spent it better.
There are some subjects where PB, for all its excellence in many areas, really falls down. One is where it cannot discuss transgender matters without descending into unpleasant slanging matches, and the other is religion where any discussion seems to become a rapid pile in on any religion based on a level of ignorance and prejudice that would even embarrass Dawkins.
You assume that, without the church, similar systems would not have happened. And it can be argued that, instead of their libraries maintaining and spreading knowledge, it spent more time gatekeeping and restricting the 'wrong' knowledge.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
The abolition of the monasteries was our controlled experiment. Some of the new landowners did take care of the destitute, but in general, the position of the poor worsened. That's why, after 1540, the laws against beggars and vagrancy became increasingly savage, because their numbers were increasing. That only changed with the Poor Law of 1601.
@ydoethur is correct. Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
War was quite a priority for churches as well, wasn't it? The Duke of Normandy went into battle with a Papal banner given him by the pope. Then there were the crusades...
War was one function among many for the Church. War was by far, the most important function for medieval, and early modern governments. Success in war, was how you were judged by your peers. That's what made monarchs like Henry VII so unusual.
Yes battles in Medieval times were like Premier League football matches or the Super Bowl now.
With Henry Vth a medieval Sir Alex Ferguson
Henry Vth got lucky once and then died shortly after. I have a feeling his glorious reputation is based on the same grounds as JFK.
Comments
"Are you bringing up Signal again? I thought they gave that up two weeks ago. It's the same old stuff from the media," he said. "Try finding something new," he said.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g8r701lrno
Looks like NPR have been sold a pup. If the Trump administration were smart they would leak fake stories and then can play the FAKE NEWS media angle. But they aren't.....
So the result is more and more criminal records, more prison places, more cost, and higher crime rates than most of our European peers. It means fewer police officers and more cells. It’s the crime equivalent of spending millions on stage 4 cancer treatment while neglecting to test for early symptoms.
Make crime illegal again. Too often it’s easy to break the law and get away with it. Track down car and bike thieves, it’s perfectly possible with contemporary technology. Treat burglaries and shoplifting as something worth prosecuting. But once they get to court, be a bit more grown up with sentencing.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/crime-rate-by-country
The U.S. has given an ultimatum to Ukraime: recognize Crimea as Russian, abandon any attempt to join NATO, and agree to a neutral zone around Zaporizhzhia NPP (to be managed by the U.S.).
Ukraine has until the London meeting tomorrow to respond.
The proposal offers nothing to Ukraine — it’s just a list of things the US will take to Putin to see if he can be appeased.
The complete collapse of the American security architecture could not have been more shameful.
https://x.com/slantchev/status/1914358800548503805
Say what you want about Asia being oppressive to live in, I'd take that over what we have which is a criminal free for all and people living with their hands in everyone else's pocket.
We can't be lectured to about this by the Conservatives who oversaw the closing and selling off of operational Police stations as well as an abject failure to do anything about improving prison capacity. Both were and remain for me unforgiveable. I see my local Police struggling to keep up with low level petty anti social opportunistic criminality such as mobile phone theft.
Counter intuitively, I would argue many parts of London are "safer" than they were - places like Brixton, Dalston and Haggerston are not what they were in the 70s and 80s.
As a long time Londoner, the only advice I've ever followed is "keep your wits about you and don't make yourself a victim".
https://abcnews.go.com/US/bob-menendez-wife-nadine-menendez-verdict-bribery-trial/story?id=120923404
It's good to see that some criminal politicos in the US are still subject to the law, even if the Republican crime syndicate unfortunately isn't.
Interesting development: China and Egypt have launched their first-ever joint air force drill, “Eagles of Civilization 2025,” at an Egyptian airbase. The exercise kicked off on April 19 and will run through early May.
Chinese influence in the region is no longer subtle, it’s starting to show...
https://x.com/Osint613/status/1914075023972716833
From Tat on Tet to tête-à-tête.
Loved a good funeral.
Everywhere in Europe, in fact, except Sweden, Belgium and France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Will
(For the record: I would describe myself as an agnostic -- and a "cultural Christian".)
States that enforce the law and have tough sentencing have got lower crime rates, lower rates of drug addiction and are better places to live. Crime is one of the major reasons so many Californians are moving to Texas and what's also surprising is that as they move to Texas they become more conservative. When they get away from the horrible leftism in those states it's almost like a reset.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
I can understand the very low rates of done failed states, but the India and Bangladesh numbers are remarkable.
As for your last paragraph: I am not piling on Catholicism. In the past I praised Pope Francis for things he had said, and I fully understand that many religious people do a heck of a lot of good. But those of faith also need to appreciate and acknowledge that evils their churches have committed, often in the very recent past. And they don't even have the excuse of ignorance...
https://x.com/thedemocrats/status/1914293583911309821
(My apologies for not beginning with a trigger notice, knowing how sensitive some are about any kind words about GWB.)
As for your second sentence, that is simply not correct. On the contrary, the Catholic Church along with the Orthodox Church and indeed the libraries of the colleges of Islam is why we have any classical works at all. You will notice all are religious. There were in fact very limited restrictions on copying or studying such works in educational or monastic settings. It was later that Protestants claimed there had been not because there had but because of their campaign against Catholicism. (As an aside, this is what Galileo got into trouble for - not heliocentrism per se, but for teaching it outside a university setting when he had agreed he wouldn't without more evidence.)
I was not, particularly, aiming at you in the last paragraph (although I do think your remark was born of ignorance, which is why I put forward the actuality for you to learn from) - although I can see on reflection why you might have taken it as such, it was not intended to be personal. There are certainly others on this thread and this subject who are spouting nonsense.
@ydoethur is correct. Henry VIII's government spent the vast majority of the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands, not in boosting education, or trade, or constructing useful infrastructure, but in waging war, in France and Scotland. War was considered the primary function of the early modern State.
Discuss.
Ukraine has received its first Saab 340 AEW&C (Airborne Early Warning and Control) aircraft. It’s now flying over Lviv
It’s radar can find targets more than 400 km away & will help coordinate Ukraine’s F-16s
Ukraine will soon receive a 2nd such plane from Sweden too
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1914360652757426231
Elon says they could see my crowd size from Mars.
"251 of the 543 newly elected members [of Parliament] have criminal cases registered against them and 27 of them have been convicted, revealed an analysis done by the Association of Democratic Reforms."
https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2024/Jun/06/record-46-of-newly-elected-lok-sabha-mps-facing-criminal-cases-study#:~:text=A record 251 (46 percent) of the 543,analysis done by Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR).
He's clearly massively unsuited to any executive post, and politely ignoring his blatant deficiencies would be absurd.
“Right sir. You are under arrest”
“But I haven’t done anything!”
“Under the 2036 Dangerous Professions Act, you will be guilty of Retired Accountancy in the first degrees.”
“There’s no such law! And it’s only 2026!”
“There will be…. Now come quietly, sir? Or are you going to resist? {happy gleam in eye, as he hefts truncheon”
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
"Can AI spot a killer? Inside the Government’s murder prediction tool"
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/can-ai-spot-a-killer-inside-the-government-s-murder-prediction-tool/ar-AA1Dkkv3?ocid=msedgntp&pc=ASTS&cvid=4c464e91ccfa48c792cb98543f5dd743&ei=18
Example: "Port of Seattle Police arrested Branson Albert, 37, of Auburn, last week on seven outstanding warrants related to car theft, identity fraud, weapons, and drug charges. Albert appeared in King County Superior Court on Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to the new cases.
According to court filings, Albert has been stealing cars from the SEA garage since 2023 and, despite a history of failing to appear, has been granted release from custody with low or no bail."
source: https://komonews.com/news/local/serial-sea-tac-airport-car-theft-suspect-charged-more-cases-pre-trial-release-thief-branson-albert-12-felony-parking-garage-handgun-possession-king-county-court-garage-identity-fraud-weapons-drug
(I haven't seen an explanation of what he did with the cars. In this area, cars are sometimes stolen to be used as battering rams to break into stores, especially those that sell marijuana.)
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/recidivism-rates-by-state
"Stocks fell sharply on Monday after President Donald Trump renewed his attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 972 points, or 2.5%. The S&P 500 dropped 2.4%. The Nasdaq Composite was down 2.6%.
The indexes were even lower earlier in the session but retraced some ground. Still, the Dow is on track for its worst April since 1932, according to Dow Jones Market Data. And the S&P 500 has fallen more than 1.5% for the sixth time this month, the most number of days since June 2022, when it also fell 1.5% six times.
I feel like not enough people when thinking about history consider, aside from any other moral issues, war is bloody expensive, and kings throughout history often seemed to be skint and begging for money (or taking it from anyone they can by force) even before wartime. The ones carefully managing the treasury seem to be an exception.
Will say a GOP rep in 3,2,1...
The most infamous were those who lost wars like Edward II
Shakes head....
I'm not a believer that money solves everything, but the whole criminal justice system feels like an area where a (relatively) small amount of money would go a long way.
Instead politicians usually compete to be toughest, and create new offences of sometimes dubious utility, while the actual administration of policing and justice goes to hell.
Yields are 20 bps higher than November - back when we had +3% real GDP growth.
We are having a substantial growth scare, with stocks down -20% from peaks, and yet, bonds have gotten zero bid whatsoever.
Our credibility is shot.
And you will pay for it. For decades to come.
https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status/1914417686731272459
Actually I don't recall seeing many reports about Trump and Canada in the last week or so, has he gotten bored or did someone finally get through to him that he is helping left wing parties the world over?
That is the most important figure
With Henry Vth a medieval Sir Alex Ferguson
MAGA voters will continue to elect numpties who hate the same people they do
If voters made politicians experience consequences for their actions we would never hear from Nigel Fucking Farage ever again
It always seemed interesting to me how powerful Henry VIII was able to become when you consider how fractious things were before the dynasty came into power, and considering how religiously fraught the time was. It's not a period I was all that interested in (more of a Civil War guy). Not that there were no rebellions or arguments over succession ever again, clearly there was, but at a casual look the nature of it seems very different after then.
When governments got windfalls, like the proceeds of monastic lands, or the silver of Potosi, it went on hiring soldiers, and building warships.
Texas homicide rate 6.7 per 100k, California 5.7 (in line with US average).
UK 1.15. Germany 0.8. Italy 0.5. Holy See 0 (until yesterday?).
Oh and nice safe strict SE Asia: Thailand 4.8, Philippines 4.3, Burma 3.8, Cambodia 1.8, Vietnam 1.5.
Police forces will now be braced for further potential flashpoints this weekend, with gatherings planned in towns and cities from Darlington to Southampton.
Large rallies are also expected in York, Coventry, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Cheltenham, Cambridge, Derby, Oxford and Bristol, and further protests are planned for next month, culminating in a London demonstration on May 25.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/21/pro-trans-protests-to-take-place-across-the-country/
By the mid-sixteenth century, you're seeing army sizes rocket, up to as many as 30-35,000. The consequences of the latter marching through a district, and foraging for food and firewood, would be devastating for the locals.
For once in our lives can we just look closer to home for ideas?
Starmer take note and get your nose out of that arse.
As long as you remember that it's fairly easy to understand their decision making.
"Moments ago, we filed a lawsuit to halt the funding freeze because it is unlawful and beyond the government’s authority."
https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2025/upholding-our-values-defending-our-university/