Posts by Stephen Judd
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I guess it could have been worse, anyway. Remember when the Viradoura school built and nearly managed to parade a Holocaust-themed Carnaval float in Rio?
A lot of Brazilians blamed their education system, which isn't exactly top-grade and doesn't do much world history -- I don't know whether we can do the same.
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Ah well, I've never liked Pravda cafe in Wellington, all the Stalinist kitsch gives me the heebie jeebies.
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Genocide results from evil, stupid, thick headed, idiotic, vain glorious, but very human causes. These aspects of humanity should be ridiculed and laughed at as frequently as possible, so good on the Lincoln students.
Call me dense, but please tease out how those students were doing that.
It still seems to me that they were playing dress-up to annoy the grown-ups.
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Years ago I played in a ceilidh band that was engaged to perform at an Irish-themed sports club function*. Some of the attendees had cooked up a hilarious jape whereby equipped with toy machine guns, balaclavas and fatigues they staged a mock IRA raid on the audience. Freakin' hilarious.
I'm afraid some of us are just deeply crass, insensitive and stupid, and that's all there is to it.
* this was in Hamilton. Le sigh.
I'm very comfortable with people dressing up as the klan and making fun of them
Who was being made fun of here? I don't think Nazis were being lampooned or satirised here (even if there could be anything brave or clever about lampooning Nazis at this late date). Clearly the "funny" part is the transgressive pleasure of burlesquing a tragic event.
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Have you considered that the crime rate may be in decline because of the higher rate of imprisonment?
I have wondered about that. It strikes me that it's hard to prove. Clearly some kinds of crime are prevented by imprisoning potential offenders. But:
- some violent offenders continue to offend in prison;
- if prison reinforces criminal propensities, then the offences prevented by confinement might be counterbalanced by offences committed afterwards;
- the demographic most likely to commit crime is declining as a proportion of the population so you need to factor that out.That's just off the top of my head.
Also, prison costs a lot of money. If you are imprisoned until you die, you'll never assault anyone (on the outside) again, but there's a reasonable chance that you wouldn't anyway. From a cost-benefit point of view there is a sentence length where the cost of incarceration outweighs the benefit to society of preventing any future offences. So yeah, maybe increased sentences are preventing some crime, but we kind of knew that anyway. What we need to understand is the complex relationship between sentence length, crimes prevented, recidivism and so on. Then we can answer the question of where the correct balance is.
In other words, that may be a correct supposition, and yet I would still want to review our current policies and would find it plausible that when all factors are considered, sentences are too long and too frequent.
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does anybody have anything about the criminal justice system in the 18th century that they'd like to share?
Yes. You can get a crappy paperback copy of the Newgate Calendar for less than $5 from Real Groovy or similar stockists of Wordsworth Editions and read slaveringly prurient 18th century crime... journalism? I'm not sure how to describe it. But anyway, you can marvel at allegedly true accounts of theft, robbery, fraud, murder etc, and note how little deterrence the Bloody Code provided in practice.
The reason for this might be that without an effective police force, criminals were only brought to justice when arrested by private persons or beadles or other functionaries for whom criminal arrest was just a sideline. So though you might be hanged for stealing a sheep, your odds of getting away, or bribing the people who held you, were pretty good.
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Once Phil Goff is no longer leader of the Labour Party, it will be possible to have a sensible discussion on crime.
Quite.
The main reason I did not vote Labour in the last three elections was Goff's record as Justice Minister. I had formed a dislike for him in my student days based on his previous ministerial tenure, but his cavalier attitude to civil rights in counter-terrorism legislation and willingness to pursue regressive justice and sentencing policy clinched it for me.
I won't be voting Labour again until he's sidelined.
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Who was Justice Minister for the previous nine years of government? Wasn't the Parole Act 2002 passed by him? Some fellow or other, I can never remember who.
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try going out in Madrid or even Santiago before midnight. Try having a nap before you go out, get hard or just go home, but FFS stop moaning about it like a bunch of old Nana's.
Yes, do not express your dislike of things I like! It is wrong! I have spoken!
*ahem* Actually, the nap beforehand is a sound scheme which I practise when I can. Shame we can't take our emulation of Madrid as far as introducing siesta.
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I just got wind of a gig at Mighty Mighty advertised as "We play at 9:30pm, nice and early".
Which would be a nice change indeed.