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.
Henry VIII was simply terrifying.
He knew the power of an image, that's for sure. Wouldn't want to run into this dude after a few pints. Someone suggest a copy of this for Trump's presidential portrait.
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?
Low reoffending rates though many states are and reducing reoffending is the main role of the criminal justice system.
Reducing crime rates is more the role of increasing education and boosting economic growth for all
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...
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.
The administrative and logistical abilities of the Roman, Ottoman, and Chinese empires, were simply in a different league to anything that Western Europe could manage, until the late sixteenth century, and again existed to create large, and efficient armies.
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.
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.
Crime and punishment is one of those situations where people often get the cause and effect the wrong way round.
If an organisation or society has to introduce bloodcurdling sanctions, it probably means that it has already failed to control crime, and may well continue to do so. The nasty stuff is there to have a (surprisingly small) deterrent effect and to signal to the normies that Something Is Being Done. In general, you are better off quietly pre-empting bad behaviour before it gets bad.
For example, not having quite so many guns in circulation in the USA would really really help.
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.
Asia as a whole is slightly lower than Europe according to UNODC. Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia are very strict when it comes to crime and is very low murder rate, significantly below the European average.
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.
Italy half the rate of the UK? What are the mafias playing at thesedays?
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.
Crime and punishment is one of those situations where people often get the cause and effect the wrong way round.
If an organisation or society has to introduce bloodcurdling sanctions, it probably means that it has already failed to control crime, and may well continue to do so. The nasty stuff is there to have a (surprisingly small) deterrent effect and to signal to the normies that Something Is Being Done. In general, you are better off quietly pre-empting bad behaviour before it gets bad.
For example, not having quite so many guns in circulation in the USA would really really help.
This is where the UK has an issue, we are letting loads of shitty things slide e.g. madness of the last government on shoplifting. Singapore on the other hand, doesn'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.
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.
Italy half the rate of the UK? What are the mafias playing at these days?
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.
Crime and punishment is one of those situations where people often get the cause and effect the wrong way round.
If an organisation or society has to introduce bloodcurdling sanctions, it probably means that it has already failed to control crime, and may well continue to do so. The nasty stuff is there to have a (surprisingly small) deterrent effect and to signal to the normies that Something Is Being Done. In general, you are better off quietly pre-empting bad behaviour before it gets bad.
For example, not having quite so many guns in circulation in the USA would really really help.
This is where the UK has an issue, we are letting loads of shitty things slide e.g. madness of the last government on shoplifting. Singapore on the other hand, doesn't.
Yup. And whilst not everything bad is due to Austerity, and some kind of rebalancing was inevitable, the squeeze on police and justice has had bad side effects.
I can see why the system overlooks crimes where the cost of catching a crim is more than the value of the harm they have caused... but CBA isn't just Cost-Benefit Analysis, it's also Can't Be... (That's enough. Ed.)
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
Alastair Campbell was/is an alcoholic, prone to psychotic episodes, who took us very controversially into a war that we are still dealing with the effects of twenty odd years later. He wasn’t even elected, yet is held in esteem by many centrists and the political media
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.
Italy half the rate of the UK? What are the mafias playing at thesedays?
I wonder if it was ever that high, or is it a bit like lynching in the US. Lynchings weren't as common as perhaps is thought of but everybody knows that the KKK could and would demonstrate their power from time to time as a sign not to challenge them.
Lots of violence brings a lot of attention. The mafia is first and foremost about business. I believe these days the likes of Ndrangheta are the people other criminals go to do with anything to do with money, borrowing, laundering, helping to facilitate coordinating global criminal organisations. They want to be as quiet as possible as too much of a spotlight is bad for the ability to shift all this money.
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.
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.
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.
Italy half the rate of the UK? What are the mafias playing at thesedays?
I wonder if it was ever that high, or is it a bit like lynching in the US. Lynchings weren't as common as perhaps is thought of but everybody knows that the KKK could and would demonstrate their power from time to time as a sign not to challenge them.
Lots of violence brings a lot of attention. The mafia is first and foremost about business. I believe these days the likes of Ndrangheta are the people other criminals go to do with anything to do with money, borrowing, laundering, helping to facilitate coordinating global criminal organisations. They want to be as quiet as possible as too much of a spotlight is bad for the ability to shift all this money.
Just checked, back in early 1990s it was high, dropped significantly, and past 20 years below 1.0.
Wasn't it suggested that when the top guys got banged up the women took much more involvement in running of the mafia families, wonder if that had an impact?
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.
I have greatly increased my admiration for the captain of Douglas Adams B-Ark. Kinda useless, kinda rubbish, but also kinda ineffectual. I'd settle for that these days.
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.
You can tell the Uni exam's are over. Bit of demo, bit of agro, then off to the ski slopes.
Then summer hols dashing between mummy and daddies homes in Cornwall and South of France, with a few weeks in South East Asia with the uni mates....but I bought a few trees to offset my carbon emissions.
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.
Until you reach communism…
That is not the way to pursue the egalitarian goal. What is the way? If I knew I'd be a very special retired city worker indeed.
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.
Henry VIII was simply terrifying.
He knew the power of an image, that's for sure. Wouldn't want to run into this dude after a few pints. Someone suggest a copy of this for Trump's presidential portrait.
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.
Henry VIII was simply terrifying.
He knew the power of an image, that's for sure. Wouldn't want to run into this dude after a few pints. Someone suggest a copy of this for Trump's presidential portrait.
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.
You can tell the Uni exam's are over. Bit of demo, bit of agro, then off to the ski slopes.
Then summer hols dashing between mummy and daddies homes in Cornwall and South of France, with a few weeks in South East Asia with the uni mates....but I bought a few trees to offset my carbon emissions.
The demo they went on to protest against CO2 emissions more than offset their flight to Thailand, I'm sure.
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've always like the unitarians: whose theology I would roughly describe as "the teachings of Jesus Christ without any of that God stuff."
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.
Sorry, that's absolutely incorrect
California has "three strikes and you are out". A third felony leads to automatic imprisonment for life
Which has completely gummed up the legal system because no one who has two felonies will ever do anything other than to to trial.
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.
The idea that South Carolina is safe is extraordinary. On almost every measure, it is a more dangerous place to be than the UK.
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.
Sorry, that's absolutely incorrect
California has "three strikes and you are out". A third felony leads to automatic imprisonment for life
Which has completely gummed up the legal system because no one who has two felonies will ever do anything other than to to trial.
This alfalfa farmer and Trump supporter would rather lose everything than admit he was wrong. Exactly why it’s hard to feel sorry for these folks—they’d rather crash and burn than change course.
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.
Sorry, that's absolutely incorrect
California has "three strikes and you are out". A third felony leads to automatic imprisonment for life
Which has completely gummed up the legal system because no one who has two felonies will ever do anything other than to to trial.
Since 2012, the felony convictions have to be serious or violent felonies.
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.
Sorry, that's absolutely incorrect
California has "three strikes and you are out". A third felony leads to automatic imprisonment for life
Which has completely gummed up the legal system because no one who has two felonies will ever do anything other than to to trial.
For crimes like theft or shoplifting?
That's why shoplifting below a certain level got cut to misdemeanor: juries simply stopped convicting people if felony shoplifting because the punishment (imprisonment for life, with no possibility of parole) seemed wildly excessive for the crime.
Surely it’s Trump doing the alcoholism joke in appointing him in the first place?
It shows utter contempt for the US military to appoint a guy like that as Defense Secretary.
Not sure Trump is focused enough to have contempt for them. He just doesn’t care. He wanted someone that looked the part and wouldn’t do anything to get in his way.
The shame is on the Republican Senate. Confirmation is a powerful check on the executive that they just didn't employ
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.
Sorry, that's absolutely incorrect
California has "three strikes and you are out". A third felony leads to automatic imprisonment for life
Which has completely gummed up the legal system because no one who has two felonies will ever do anything other than to to trial.
Since 2012, all three of their felony convictions have to be serious or violent felonies.
Nevertheless, it means everyone takes their third felony to court rather than pleading guilty. Which means that the court system is completely gummed up.
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.
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
Alastair Campbell was/is an alcoholic, prone to psychotic episodes, who took us very controversially into a war that we are still dealing with the effects of twenty odd years later. He wasn’t even elected, yet is held in esteem by many centrists and the political media
Most recently seen arselicking a terrorist in a tie in Syria.
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.
Sorry, that's absolutely incorrect
California has "three strikes and you are out". A third felony leads to automatic imprisonment for life
Which has completely gummed up the legal system because no one who has two felonies will ever do anything other than to to trial.
For crimes like theft or shoplifting?
That's why shoplifting below a certain level got cut to misdemeanor: juries simply stopped convicting people if felony shoplifting because the punishment (imprisonment for life, with no possibility of parole) seemed wildly excessive for the crime.
This isn't quite true either. Its 25 years minimum then opportunity for parole.
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.
Sorry, that's absolutely incorrect
California has "three strikes and you are out". A third felony leads to automatic imprisonment for life
Which has completely gummed up the legal system because no one who has two felonies will ever do anything other than to to trial.
For crimes like theft or shoplifting?
That's why shoplifting below a certain level got cut to misdemeanor: juries simply stopped convicting people if felony shoplifting because the punishment (imprisonment for life, with no possibility of parole) seemed wildly excessive for the crime.
This isn't quite true either. Its 25 years minimum then opportunity for parole.
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.
Henry VIII was simply terrifying.
He knew the power of an image, that's for sure. Wouldn't want to run into this dude after a few pints. Someone suggest a copy of this for Trump's presidential portrait.
GPT does as you command (apols to leon) :
It's funny when it can't work things out - like the fact that those puffs on the bodice are his undershirt pulled through. So it's done them as bobbles. And goodness knows what it's done to his crotch.
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.
Huawei readies new AI chip for mass shipment as China seeks Nvidia alternatives, sources say
Huawei's 910C, a graphics processing unit (GPU), represents an architectural evolution rather than a technological breakthrough, according to one of the two people and a third source familiar with its design.
It achieves performance comparable to Nvidia's H100 chip by combining two 910B processors into a single package through advanced integration techniques, they said.
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.
Henry VIII was simply terrifying.
He knew the power of an image, that's for sure. Wouldn't want to run into this dude after a few pints. Someone suggest a copy of this for Trump's presidential portrait.
GPT does as you command (apols to leon) :
It's funny when it can't work things out - like the fact that those puffs on the bodice are his undershirt pulled through. So it's done them as bobbles.
I've seen that portrait a thousand times and that had honestly never occurred to me until now.
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.
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.
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.
Unless it has changed most end of year exams are in May/early June.
It is Easter hols though for students and many will be on revision until actual exams.
Many of the agitators always seem to be PhD students in their 10th year of researching the intersectional view of how global warming will effect one armed black trans lesbians, or doing some sort of elected role within the SU.
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
Alastair Campbell was/is an alcoholic, prone to psychotic episodes, who took us very controversially into a war that we are still dealing with the effects of twenty odd years later. He wasn’t even elected, yet is held in esteem by many centrists and the political media
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.
Henry VIII was simply terrifying.
He knew the power of an image, that's for sure. Wouldn't want to run into this dude after a few pints. Someone suggest a copy of this for Trump's presidential portrait.
GPT does as you command (apols to leon) :
It's funny when it can't work things out - like the fact that those puffs on the bodice are his undershirt pulled through. So it's done them as bobbles. And goodness knows what it's done to his crotch.
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.
Henry VIII was simply terrifying.
He knew the power of an image, that's for sure. Wouldn't want to run into this dude after a few pints. Someone suggest a copy of this for Trump's presidential portrait.
GPT does as you command (apols to leon) :
Not sure he would appreciate being shown wearing a skirt!
Surely it’s Trump doing the alcoholism joke in appointing him in the first place?
It shows utter contempt for the US military to appoint a guy like that as Defense Secretary.
Not sure Trump is focused enough to have contempt for them. He just doesn’t care. He wanted someone that looked the part and wouldn’t do anything to get in his way.
The shame is on the Republican Senate. Confirmation is a powerful check on the executive that they just didn't employ
I think also Trump liked that Pete Hangoverseth had written a book saying America would win wars if only its warriors were all spartans and not DEI/trans/effete bleedin' heart pacifists or something like that.
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.
Sorry, that's absolutely incorrect
California has "three strikes and you are out". A third felony leads to automatic imprisonment for life
Which has completely gummed up the legal system because no one who has two felonies will ever do anything other than to to trial.
For crimes like theft or shoplifting?
Above a relatively low dollar threshold. Also low level personal use of drugs.
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.
Henry VIII was simply terrifying.
He knew the power of an image, that's for sure. Wouldn't want to run into this dude after a few pints. Someone suggest a copy of this for Trump's presidential portrait.
GPT does as you command (apols to leon) :
It's funny when it can't work things out - like the fact that those puffs on the bodice are his undershirt pulled through. So it's done them as bobbles. And goodness knows what it's done to his crotch.
This alfalfa farmer and Trump supporter would rather lose everything than admit he was wrong. Exactly why it’s hard to feel sorry for these folks—they’d rather crash and burn than change course.
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.
Unless it has changed most end of year exams are in May/early June.
It is Easter hols though for students and many will be on revision until actual exams.
Many of the agitators always seem to be PhD students in their 10th year of researching the intersectional view of how global warming will effect one armed black trans lesbians, or doing some sort of elected role within the SU.
Well yes now, but not "next month to May 25". The timeline doesn't match, and looking at the photos they don't seem to be mostly students. Do we have numbers on numbers attending and age/sex (?!) profile.
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.
Unless it has changed most end of year exams are in May/early June.
It is Easter hols though for students and many will be on revision until actual exams.
Many of the agitators always seem to be PhD students in their 10th year of researching the intersectional view of how global warming will effect one armed black trans lesbians, or doing some sort of elected role within the SU.
Well yes now, but not "next month to May 25". The timeline doesn't match, and looking at the photos they don't seem to be mostly students. Do we have numbers on numbers attending and age/sex (?!) profile.
In 1997, I did my Finals one week, and the next I was voting for Tony Blair's lot!
This alfalfa farmer and Trump supporter would rather lose everything than admit he was wrong. Exactly why it’s hard to feel sorry for these folks—they’d rather crash and burn than change course.
“He doesn’t think he was wrong. He recognises that there are personal consequences but still believes it was the right thing for the country.”
That is an alternative interpretation which is entirely consistent with the video clip
He’s in denial and is using the country line as a means of self-soothing . Remind me to find the smallest violin when he’s begging for loose change outside Walmart .
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.
Unless it has changed most end of year exams are in May/early June.
It is Easter hols though for students and many will be on revision until actual exams.
Many of the agitators always seem to be PhD students in their 10th year of researching the intersectional view of how global warming will effect one armed black trans lesbians, or doing some sort of elected role within the SU.
Well yes now, but not "next month to May 25". The timeline doesn't match, and looking at the photos they don't seem to be mostly students. Do we have numbers on numbers attending and age/sex (?!) profile.
In 1997, I did my Finals one week, and the next I was voting for Tony Blair's lot!
This alfalfa farmer and Trump supporter would rather lose everything than admit he was wrong. Exactly why it’s hard to feel sorry for these folks—they’d rather crash and burn than change course.
“He doesn’t think he was wrong. He recognises that there are personal consequences but still believes it was the right thing for the country.”
That is an alternative interpretation which is entirely consistent with the video clip
He’s in denial and is using the country line as a means of self-soothing . Remind me to find the smallest violin when he’s begging for loose change outside Walmart .
I try not to judge fellow humans in need. I just help them.
This alfalfa farmer and Trump supporter would rather lose everything than admit he was wrong. Exactly why it’s hard to feel sorry for these folks—they’d rather crash and burn than change course.
“He doesn’t think he was wrong. He recognises that there are personal consequences but still believes it was the right thing for the country.”
That is an alternative interpretation which is entirely consistent with the video clip
He’s in denial and is using the country line as a means of self-soothing . Remind me to find the smallest violin when he’s begging for loose change outside Walmart .
I try not to judge fellow humans in need. I just help them.
The farmer can own the consequences of his vote . The tick in the box for Trump has unleashed so much hate and the betrayal of allies and the appeasement of Russia . You’re obviously a better more forgiving person than me . I simply cannot forgive those who voted for Trump and don’t care if their lives are left in ruins . I have sympathy for those Americans who wanted nothing to do with the stain on humanity , the rest to be blunt can go to hell.
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
Alastair Campbell was/is an alcoholic, prone to psychotic episodes, who took us very controversially into a war that we are still dealing with the effects of twenty odd years later. He wasn’t even elected, yet is held in esteem by many centrists and the political media
"took us... into a war".
How exactly did he take us there? Laughable rewrite of history.
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
Alastair Campbell was/is an alcoholic, prone to psychotic episodes, who took us very controversially into a war that we are still dealing with the effects of twenty odd years later. He wasn’t even elected, yet is held in esteem by many centrists and the political media
"took us... into a war".
How exactly did he take us there? Laughable rewrite of history.
Tony took us in, but he was heavily aided and abetted by Campbell.
This alfalfa farmer and Trump supporter would rather lose everything than admit he was wrong. Exactly why it’s hard to feel sorry for these folks—they’d rather crash and burn than change course.
“He doesn’t think he was wrong. He recognises that there are personal consequences but still believes it was the right thing for the country.”
That is an alternative interpretation which is entirely consistent with the video clip
He’s in denial and is using the country line as a means of self-soothing . Remind me to find the smallest violin when he’s begging for loose change outside Walmart .
I try not to judge fellow humans in need. I just help them.
The farmer can own the consequences of his vote . The tick in the box for Trump has unleashed so much hate and the betrayal of allies and the appeasement of Russia . You’re obviously a better more forgiving person than me . I simply cannot forgive those who voted for Trump and don’t care if their lives are left in ruins . I have sympathy for those Americans who wanted nothing to do with the stain on humanity , the rest to be blunt can go to hell.
So you see someone begging outside of Walmart and you will interrogate them on their political views before determining whether they deserve your assistance?
Maybe the Chancellor should try this line when she abolished the triple lock ...?
Cardone: If you're worried about your 401(k), your IRA, traders out there or bankers worried about your commissions, just step aside. This is not the time for Monday quarterbacking. You're not in the game. President Donald Trump is. https://x.com/Acyn/status/1914464703759442133
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
Alastair Campbell was/is an alcoholic, prone to psychotic episodes, who took us very controversially into a war that we are still dealing with the effects of twenty odd years later. He wasn’t even elected, yet is held in esteem by many centrists and the political media
I am not fan of Campbell, indeed left the Labour Party 2 decades ago because of what his coterie were up to.
He stopped drinking alcohol in 1986, well before his time in New Labour, and has long campaigned on mental health issues indeed being recognised by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
"Dubya" Bush was also a reformed alcoholic, but has Hegseth ever stopped drinking? Being an active alcoholic is very different to being a reformed one.
Trump envoy’s conflict of interest: a Russia-linked business partner Steve Witkoff, Trump's Special Envoy, has a serious and unreported conflict of interest in Russia-Ukraine negotiations: his (ongoing commercial) relationship with Ukraine-sanctioned businessman Len Blavatnik. https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/scoop-trump-envoys-conflict-of-interest
Trump envoy’s conflict of interest: a Russia-linked business partner Steve Witkoff, Trump's Special Envoy, has a serious and unreported conflict of interest in Russia-Ukraine negotiations: his (ongoing commercial) relationship with Ukraine-sanctioned businessman Len Blavatnik. https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/scoop-trump-envoys-conflict-of-interest
Why is a single random guy, Steve Witkoff, in charge of handling all the negotiations with the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Iranians, and the Russians all at the same time and Trump is outraged we are not getting fast results on peace talks?
On Wednesday, the city council approved a resolution authorizing Homestead to partner with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through a federal program known as the 287(g) task force model. This program allows police officers to stop, question, and detain people suspected of violating immigration laws...
F1: my review of Saudi Arabia is up here, including my take on the lap 1 incidents (Gasly-Tsunoda = racing incident, Verstappen entirely tried to gain an unfair advantage and deserved to be penalised) and how the title battle is shaping up. Also, the transcript has a lovely graph.
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.
Crime and punishment is one of those situations where people often get the cause and effect the wrong way round.
If an organisation or society has to introduce bloodcurdling sanctions, it probably means that it has already failed to control crime, and may well continue to do so. The nasty stuff is there to have a (surprisingly small) deterrent effect and to signal to the normies that Something Is Being Done. In general, you are better off quietly pre-empting bad behaviour before it gets bad.
For example, not having quite so many guns in circulation in the USA would really really help.
This is where the UK has an issue, we are letting loads of shitty things slide e.g. madness of the last government on shoplifting. Singapore on the other hand, doesn't.
My pic for today. Don't let the Singapore police catch you with a durian.
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
Alastair Campbell was/is an alcoholic, prone to psychotic episodes, who took us very controversially into a war that we are still dealing with the effects of twenty odd years later. He wasn’t even elected, yet is held in esteem by many centrists and the political media
I am not fan of Campbell, indeed left the Labour Party 2 decades ago because of what his coterie were up to.
He stopped drinking alcohol in 1986, well before his time in New Labour, and has long campaigned on mental health issues indeed being recognised by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
"Dubya" Bush was also a reformed alcoholic, but has Hegseth ever stopped drinking? Being an active alcoholic is very different to being a reformed one.
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
Alastair Campbell was/is an alcoholic, prone to psychotic episodes, who took us very controversially into a war that we are still dealing with the effects of twenty odd years later. He wasn’t even elected, yet is held in esteem by many centrists and the political media
I am not fan of Campbell, indeed left the Labour Party 2 decades ago because of what his coterie were up to.
He stopped drinking alcohol in 1986, well before his time in New Labour, and has long campaigned on mental health issues indeed being recognised by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
"Dubya" Bush was also a reformed alcoholic, but has Hegseth ever stopped drinking? Being an active alcoholic is very different to being a reformed one.
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.
Crime and punishment is one of those situations where people often get the cause and effect the wrong way round.
If an organisation or society has to introduce bloodcurdling sanctions, it probably means that it has already failed to control crime, and may well continue to do so. The nasty stuff is there to have a (surprisingly small) deterrent effect and to signal to the normies that Something Is Being Done. In general, you are better off quietly pre-empting bad behaviour before it gets bad.
For example, not having quite so many guns in circulation in the USA would really really help.
This is where the UK has an issue, we are letting loads of shitty things slide e.g. madness of the last government on shoplifting. Singapore on the other hand, doesn't.
My pic for today. Don't let the Singapore police catch you with a durian.
I was in Singapore a few weeks ago as part of my Asia business trip. Those fines are on the low side compared to some. If I remember correctly, $10k if you feed a wild monkey.
Most make a lot of sense, however the no drinking even water at all inside any subway station or train in a country that is 30-40 oC every day with 80-100% humidity I thought was one of the odd ones.
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.
One of the only positives of Henry VIII was that it laid the foundations for the early modern state with centralised institutions like the Royal Navy, armouries and Church of England.
He was a brutal and merciless tyrant but the Wars of the Roses was in living memory and the Tudors were a sickly lot with a tenuous claim to the throne; he was deeply worried about it starting all over again without a male heir.
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.
Crime and punishment is one of those situations where people often get the cause and effect the wrong way round.
If an organisation or society has to introduce bloodcurdling sanctions, it probably means that it has already failed to control crime, and may well continue to do so. The nasty stuff is there to have a (surprisingly small) deterrent effect and to signal to the normies that Something Is Being Done. In general, you are better off quietly pre-empting bad behaviour before it gets bad.
For example, not having quite so many guns in circulation in the USA would really really help.
This is where the UK has an issue, we are letting loads of shitty things slide e.g. madness of the last government on shoplifting. Singapore on the other hand, doesn't.
My pic for today. Don't let the Singapore police catch you with a durian.
Having smelt durian, that’s actually quite moderated. Opening a box of fresh, chopped up durian in a confined space is nasty behaviour.
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
Alastair Campbell was/is an alcoholic, prone to psychotic episodes, who took us very controversially into a war that we are still dealing with the effects of twenty odd years later. He wasn’t even elected, yet is held in esteem by many centrists and the political media
"took us... into a war".
How exactly did he take us there? Laughable rewrite of history.
Tony took us in, but he was heavily aided and abetted by Campbell.
And IDS. Not sure how much the shiny headed regime changer was drinking.
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?
Yes, I am saying that. Because you are wrong. Just to take one example, Galileo, as I noted, was not censured for his views on heliocentrism (he was allowed those) but for promoting them as fact when he had been ordered due to lack of evidence to promote them as a theory only. Moreover, he did so in a book commissioned from him by the Pope, who had specifically told him to lay out competing theories in a neutral manner.
You are again, talking from ignorance. Specifically, the Draper-White Conflict thesis, which has long been discredited by anyone other than raving lunatics like Dawkins and Carrier. (As for how it held back science, without religion Isaac Newton would not have done any experiments in maths or physics. Just saying.)
To give you some idea of how your ideas come across, it's as though I was trying to persuade you and @Casino_Royale of the benefits of perpetual motion machines based on one book I'd read written in the 1850s.
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?
Yes, I am saying that. Because you are wrong. Just to take one example, Galileo, as I noted, was not censured for his views on heliocentrism (he was allowed those) but for promoting them as fact when he had been ordered due to lack of evidence to promote them as a theory only. Moreover, he did so in a book commissioned from him by the Pope, who had specifically told him to lay out competing theories in a neutral manner.
You are again, talking from ignorance. Specifically, the Draper-White Conflict thesis, which has long been discredited by anyone other than raving lunatics like Dawkins and Carrier. (As for how it held back science, without religion Isaac Newton would not have done any experiments in maths or physics. Just saying.)
To give you some idea of how your ideas come across, it's as though I was trying to persuade you and @Casino_Royale of the benefits of perpetual motion machines based on one book I'd read written in the 1850s.
I will try not to respond in kind.
As a modern example of the way religion and church can be utterly backwards; look at the way that evolution is *still* a controversial theory for many religious people, who prefer creationism. It shouldn't be.
If you are asserting the church did not hold back knowledge and science, then you are wrong. If you are claiming the church did not ban books, you are wrong. If you are saying the church did not burn books, you are wrong.
Faith and religion can be a great support and strength for many people. I get that; and have seen acquaintances who have been helped by their fellow churchgoers. I can understand why it matters to people. But trying to excuse the evils established religions have done in the past is just wrong.
I'm very much undecided if Catholicism and, to a lesser extent Protestantism, has been good or bad for humanity and civilisation.
What do we think about Republicans waiving through the nomination of an alcoholic?
Alastair Campbell was/is an alcoholic, prone to psychotic episodes, who took us very controversially into a war that we are still dealing with the effects of twenty odd years later. He wasn’t even elected, yet is held in esteem by many centrists and the political media
I am not fan of Campbell, indeed left the Labour Party 2 decades ago because of what his coterie were up to.
He stopped drinking alcohol in 1986, well before his time in New Labour, and has long campaigned on mental health issues indeed being recognised by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
"Dubya" Bush was also a reformed alcoholic, but has Hegseth ever stopped drinking? Being an active alcoholic is very different to being a reformed one.
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?
Yes, I am saying that. Because you are wrong. Just to take one example, Galileo, as I noted, was not censured for his views on heliocentrism (he was allowed those) but for promoting them as fact when he had been ordered due to lack of evidence to promote them as a theory only. Moreover, he did so in a book commissioned from him by the Pope, who had specifically told him to lay out competing theories in a neutral manner.
You are again, talking from ignorance. Specifically, the Draper-White Conflict thesis, which has long been discredited by anyone other than raving lunatics like Dawkins and Carrier. (As for how it held back science, without religion Isaac Newton would not have done any experiments in maths or physics. Just saying.)
To give you some idea of how your ideas come across, it's as though I was trying to persuade you and @Casino_Royale of the benefits of perpetual motion machines based on one book I'd read written in the 1850s.
I will try not to respond in kind.
As a modern example of the way religion and church can be utterly backwards; look at the way that evolution is *still* a controversial theory for many religious people, who prefer creationism. It shouldn't be.
If you are asserting the church did not hold back knowledge and science, then you are wrong. If you are claiming the church did not ban books, you are wrong. If you are saying the church did not burn books, you are wrong.
Faith and religion can be a great support and strength for many people. I get that; and have seen acquaintances who have been helped by their fellow churchgoers. I can understand why it matters to people. But trying to excuse the evils established religions have done in the past is just wrong.
I'm very much undecided if Catholicism and, to a lesser extent Protestantism, has been good or bad for humanity and civilisation.
Sorry, I am not wrong. You are. As has been demonstrated to you several times on this thread and not just by me. Everything you have said is essentially based on misinformation. I don't think you realise that, because you've simply read the wrong books, mostly out of date ones.
Yes the church did occasionally ban books. Not often. Yes, it did sometimes burn books. Not often. It certainly did not hold back science and knowledge. Quite the contrary, as almost all recent literature that's not written by complete loons like Catherine Nixey demonstrates, it was not only a central repository of materials but in managing the schools and universities in a way that allowed for their exploration was central to the development of scientific understanding from the fourteenth century (repeat, fourteenth century) onwards.
Feel free to check the literature and come back when you've found that out for yourself. I would recommend James Hannan's God's Philosophers as an accessible place to start, or if you don't fancy buying, Tim O'Neill's blog History for Atheists (which also includes a bibliography) as readily available (Tim is a former President of the Australian Humanist Association).
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?
Yes, I am saying that. Because you are wrong. Just to take one example, Galileo, as I noted, was not censured for his views on heliocentrism (he was allowed those) but for promoting them as fact when he had been ordered due to lack of evidence to promote them as a theory only. Moreover, he did so in a book commissioned from him by the Pope, who had specifically told him to lay out competing theories in a neutral manner.
You are again, talking from ignorance. Specifically, the Draper-White Conflict thesis, which has long been discredited by anyone other than raving lunatics like Dawkins and Carrier. (As for how it held back science, without religion Isaac Newton would not have done any experiments in maths or physics. Just saying.)
To give you some idea of how your ideas come across, it's as though I was trying to persuade you and @Casino_Royale of the benefits of perpetual motion machines based on one book I'd read written in the 1850s.
I will try not to respond in kind.
As a modern example of the way religion and church can be utterly backwards; look at the way that evolution is *still* a controversial theory for many religious people, who prefer creationism. It shouldn't be.
If you are asserting the church did not hold back knowledge and science, then you are wrong. If you are claiming the church did not ban books, you are wrong. If you are saying the church did not burn books, you are wrong.
Faith and religion can be a great support and strength for many people. I get that; and have seen acquaintances who have been helped by their fellow churchgoers. I can understand why it matters to people. But trying to excuse the evils established religions have done in the past is just wrong.
I'm very much undecided if Catholicism and, to a lesser extent Protestantism, has been good or bad for humanity and civilisation.
Sorry, I am not wrong. You are. As has been demonstrated to you several times on this thread and not just by me. Everything you have said is essentially based on misinformation. I don't think you realise that, because you've simply read the wrong books, mostly out of date ones.
Yes the church did occasionally ban books. Not often. Yes, it did sometimes burn books. Not often. It certainly did not hold back science and knowledge. Quite the contrary, as almost all recent literature that's not written by complete loons like Catherine Nixey demonstrates, it was not only a central repository of materials but in managing the schools and universities in a way that allowed for their exploration was central to the development of scientific understanding from the fourteenth century (repeat, fourteenth century) onwards.
Feel free to check the literature and come back when you've found that out for yourself. I would recommend James Hannan's God's Philosophers as an accessible place to start, or if you don't fancy buying, Tim O'Neill's blog History for Atheists (which also includes a bibliography) as readily available (Tim is a former President of the Australian Humanist Association).
In return, I shall give you, as one example, the Index Liborum Prohibitum. Active until 1966.
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?
Yes, I am saying that. Because you are wrong. Just to take one example, Galileo, as I noted, was not censured for his views on heliocentrism (he was allowed those) but for promoting them as fact when he had been ordered due to lack of evidence to promote them as a theory only. Moreover, he did so in a book commissioned from him by the Pope, who had specifically told him to lay out competing theories in a neutral manner.
You are again, talking from ignorance. Specifically, the Draper-White Conflict thesis, which has long been discredited by anyone other than raving lunatics like Dawkins and Carrier. (As for how it held back science, without religion Isaac Newton would not have done any experiments in maths or physics. Just saying.)
To give you some idea of how your ideas come across, it's as though I was trying to persuade you and @Casino_Royale of the benefits of perpetual motion machines based on one book I'd read written in the 1850s.
I will try not to respond in kind.
As a modern example of the way religion and church can be utterly backwards; look at the way that evolution is *still* a controversial theory for many religious people, who prefer creationism. It shouldn't be.
If you are asserting the church did not hold back knowledge and science, then you are wrong. If you are claiming the church did not ban books, you are wrong. If you are saying the church did not burn books, you are wrong.
Faith and religion can be a great support and strength for many people. I get that; and have seen acquaintances who have been helped by their fellow churchgoers. I can understand why it matters to people. But trying to excuse the evils established religions have done in the past is just wrong.
I'm very much undecided if Catholicism and, to a lesser extent Protestantism, has been good or bad for humanity and civilisation.
Sorry, I am not wrong. You are. As has been demonstrated to you several times on this thread and not just by me. Everything you have said is essentially based on misinformation. I don't think you realise that, because you've simply read the wrong books, mostly out of date ones.
Yes the church did occasionally ban books. Not often. Yes, it did sometimes burn books. Not often. It certainly did not hold back science and knowledge. Quite the contrary, as almost all recent literature that's not written by complete loons like Catherine Nixey demonstrates, it was not only a central repository of materials but in managing the schools and universities in a way that allowed for their exploration was central to the development of scientific understanding from the fourteenth century (repeat, fourteenth century) onwards.
Feel free to check the literature and come back when you've found that out for yourself. I would recommend James Hannan's God's Philosophers as an accessible place to start, or if you don't fancy buying, Tim O'Neill's blog History for Atheists (which also includes a bibliography) as readily available (Tim is a former President of the Australian Humanist Association).
In return, I shall give you, as one example, the Index Liborum Prohibitum. Active until 1966.
And again, I mention the battle between creationism and evolution that is being fought today, and whose effects on science is chilling.
Outside a very small minority, it's not. And a lot of those seem to be scientists obsessed it's religion as much as anything (how much better a scientist would Dawkins have been if he hadn't spent his time shoehorning dubious theology based on things he learned as a six year old in Sunday School into everything)?
And again, we come back to, you offer one example but not an actual overview. That's not doing anything to advance your case, because nobody is disputing that there were bans on books at different times. There were in this country until 1959, in case you were unaware of it.
I would recommend doing some actual research from professional scholars, or even amateurs who have gone through proper processes. You will find I think that it is somewhat different from what you believe.
Comments
Someone suggest a copy of this for Trump's presidential portrait.
Reducing crime rates is more the role of increasing education and boosting economic growth for all
Palestine, trans rights
https://x.com/_connieshaw/status/1913586077077549285
If an organisation or society has to introduce bloodcurdling sanctions, it probably means that it has already failed to control crime, and may well continue to do so. The nasty stuff is there to have a (surprisingly small) deterrent effect and to signal to the normies that Something Is Being Done. In general, you are better off quietly pre-empting bad behaviour before it gets bad.
For example, not having quite so many guns in circulation in the USA would really really help.
I can see why the system overlooks crimes where the cost of catching a crim is more than the value of the harm they have caused... but CBA isn't just Cost-Benefit Analysis, it's also Can't Be... (That's enough. Ed.)
Lots of violence brings a lot of attention. The mafia is first and foremost about business. I believe these days the likes of Ndrangheta are the people other criminals go to do with anything to do with money, borrowing, laundering, helping to facilitate coordinating global criminal organisations. They want to be as quiet as possible as too much of a spotlight is bad for the ability to shift all this money.
Wasn't it suggested that when the top guys got banged up the women took much more involvement in running of the mafia families, wonder if that had an impact?
California has "three strikes and you are out". A third felony leads to automatic imprisonment for life
Which has completely gummed up the legal system because no one who has two felonies will ever do anything other than to to trial.
@cwebbonline
This alfalfa farmer and Trump supporter would rather lose everything than admit he was wrong. Exactly why it’s hard to feel sorry for these folks—they’d rather crash and burn than change course.
https://x.com/cwebbonline/status/1914106983655067952
The shame is on the Republican Senate. Confirmation is a powerful check on the executive that they just didn't employ
https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/exams/timetables
Huawei's 910C, a graphics processing unit (GPU), represents an architectural evolution rather than a technological breakthrough, according to one of the two people and a third source familiar with its design.
It achieves performance comparable to Nvidia's H100 chip by combining two 910B processors into a single package through advanced integration techniques, they said.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/huawei-readies-new-ai-chip-mass-shipment-china-seeks-nvidia-alternatives-sources-2025-04-21/
Maybe kle5 will figure that out.
Many of the agitators always seem to be PhD students in their 10th year of researching the intersectional view of how global warming will effect one armed black trans lesbians, or doing some sort of elected role within the SU.
That is an alternative interpretation which is entirely consistent with the video clip
How exactly did he take us there? Laughable rewrite of history.
Cardone: If you're worried about your 401(k), your IRA, traders out there or bankers worried about your commissions, just step aside. This is not the time for Monday quarterbacking. You're not in the game. President Donald Trump is.
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1914464703759442133
He stopped drinking alcohol in 1986, well before his time in New Labour, and has long campaigned on mental health issues indeed being recognised by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
"Dubya" Bush was also a reformed alcoholic, but has Hegseth ever stopped drinking? Being an active alcoholic is very different to being a reformed one.
Steve Witkoff, Trump's Special Envoy, has a serious and unreported conflict of interest in Russia-Ukraine negotiations: his (ongoing commercial) relationship with Ukraine-sanctioned businessman Len Blavatnik.
https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/scoop-trump-envoys-conflict-of-interest
It's pretty weird.
https://x.com/RealJakeBroe/status/1914469016850325687
Homestead to Deputize Its Police for Immigration Enforcement
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/homestead-police-partners-with-ice-for-immigration-enforcement-22898917
The City of Homestead — home to a large population of migrant farmworkers — has approved a plan to give its police officers the authority to assist federal agents in enforcing immigration laws.
On Wednesday, the city council approved a resolution authorizing Homestead to partner with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through a federal program known as the 287(g) task force model. This program allows police officers to stop, question, and detain people suspected of violating immigration laws...
F1: my review of Saudi Arabia is up here, including my take on the lap 1 incidents (Gasly-Tsunoda = racing incident, Verstappen entirely tried to gain an unfair advantage and deserved to be penalised) and how the title battle is shaping up. Also, the transcript has a lovely graph.
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/f1-2025-saudi-arabian-grand-prix-review/
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f1-2025-saudi-arabian-grand-prix-review/id1786574257?i=1000704410551
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1xxxu5PeXCJvkNSieGr70V
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/bcfe213b-55fb-408a-a823-dc6693ee9f78/episodes/6f22639b-8655-4bcd-9400-c3972b1a4994/undercutters---f1-podcast-f1-2025-saudi-arabian-grand-prix-review
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2025/04/f1-2025-saudi-arabian-grand-prix-review.html
Most make a lot of sense, however the no drinking even water at all inside any subway station or train in a country that is 30-40 oC every day with 80-100% humidity I thought was one of the odd ones.
He was a brutal and merciless tyrant but the Wars of the Roses was in living memory and the Tudors were a sickly lot with a tenuous claim to the throne; he was deeply worried about it starting all over again without a male heir.
https://youtu.be/9Ah4tW-k8Ao?si=pGUuehK9P7NNxiH_
NEW THREAD
Not sure how much the shiny headed regime changer was drinking.
You are again, talking from ignorance. Specifically, the Draper-White Conflict thesis, which has long been discredited by anyone other than raving lunatics like Dawkins and Carrier. (As for how it held back science, without religion Isaac Newton would not have done any experiments in maths or physics. Just saying.)
To give you some idea of how your ideas come across, it's as though I was trying to persuade you and @Casino_Royale of the benefits of perpetual motion machines based on one book I'd read written in the 1850s.
As a modern example of the way religion and church can be utterly backwards; look at the way that evolution is *still* a controversial theory for many religious people, who prefer creationism. It shouldn't be.
If you are asserting the church did not hold back knowledge and science, then you are wrong. If you are claiming the church did not ban books, you are wrong. If you are saying the church did not burn books, you are wrong.
Faith and religion can be a great support and strength for many people. I get that; and have seen acquaintances who have been helped by their fellow churchgoers. I can understand why it matters to people. But trying to excuse the evils established religions have done in the past is just wrong.
I'm very much undecided if Catholicism and, to a lesser extent Protestantism, has been good or bad for humanity and civilisation.
Another winner for Trump.
https://x.com/kobeissiletter/status/1914279658008257001?s=61
Yes the church did occasionally ban books. Not often. Yes, it did sometimes burn books. Not often. It certainly did not hold back science and knowledge. Quite the contrary, as almost all recent literature that's not written by complete loons like Catherine Nixey demonstrates, it was not only a central repository of materials but in managing the schools and universities in a way that allowed for their exploration was central to the development of scientific understanding from the fourteenth century (repeat, fourteenth century) onwards.
Feel free to check the literature and come back when you've found that out for yourself. I would recommend James Hannan's God's Philosophers as an accessible place to start, or if you don't fancy buying, Tim O'Neill's blog History for Atheists (which also includes a bibliography) as readily available (Tim is a former President of the Australian Humanist Association).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum
And again, I mention the battle between creationism and evolution that is being fought today, and whose effects on science is chilling.
And again, we come back to, you offer one example but not an actual overview. That's not doing anything to advance your case, because nobody is disputing that there were bans on books at different times. There were in this country until 1959, in case you were unaware of it.
I would recommend doing some actual research from professional scholars, or even amateurs who have gone through proper processes. You will find I think that it is somewhat different from what you believe.