A Place to Stand

This includes those comments I have kept a note of up to the the Guardian deciding that pushing their views would be assisted by my absence.

Guardian article subheaded "The coming UN vote for a universal moratorium on the death penalty could mark another turning point for civilisation"

True though Ms Bonino clearly does not understand the English language enough to know that turning point means a point at which one turns. The prime duty of government is to protect the citizen. That means that when the citizen is threatened or actually subject to murder it is government's DUTY, not pleasure or choice, to act decisively to discourage such acts. If we accept that the death penalty tends to discourage those who, in the full knowledge of what they do, commit murder then it is the DUTY of government to execute them.

This would indeed be a "turning point" on a road which has previously led up from barbarism to civilisation.

The statistical evidence is that execution does deter (very much more strongly that passive smoking kills & pretty much on a par with whether active smoking does). It is also intuitively obvious & anybody who says otherwise either has to be able to explain why murderers are deterred by the chance of imprisonment but not by execution or to explain why they aren't personally on record as saying murderers shouldn't get anything worse than probation.

It is a fake by politicians who haven't the guts to do their plain duty & expect plaudits for it. In fact the overwhelming majority of our leaders DO believe in the death penalty - we just disagree on whom to use it against. I believe in the execution of particularly vicious murderers & they believe & indeed practice the execution of pregnant innocent Serbian women. I trust nobody will suggest that there is any true moral equivalence between the toughest supporter of hanging & ANY of the genocidal scum MPs who support the latter proposition.
======================
A 2nd post on that thread was deleted by them. It read

"Googling Ms Bonino <the author of the article against the death penalty>it turns out that she not only supported the genocidal war to murder pregnant Serbian women but was on the list to be gauletier of the genocidal Nazi regime we established there.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/374668.stm

I trust nobody will ever suggest that either that obscene genocidal child raping Nazi whore, nor anybody who shares her platform & fails to denounce her, can ever, under any circumstances, claim any form of moral equivalence to those on the traditional side. On such hypocrisy so much of modern government is built."
---------------------------
Nuclear http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/letters/display.var.1908365.0.0.php

Trump http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/letters/display.var.1908368.0.0.php
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/letters/display.var.1917503.0.0.php thurs

Ashdown to Afghanistan http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_korski/2007/12/from_bosnia_to_afghanistan.html Guardian article

Nazi Ashdown http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_korski/2007/12/from_bosnia_to_afghanistan.html Guardian article

Martin Bell http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/martin_bell/2007/12/return_of_the_censor.html Guardian article

And in the best tradition of when one door closes another opens - my being censored by the Scotsman seems to have been ended. They have just done a revamp of the site (& I agree with David Farrer of Freedom & Whisky that it is distinctly not an improvement) & presumably this means a fresh start - or it may merely be that, having published a letter of mine on which I was then deemed unworthy to comment did look rather silly.