Heffer redux
An almost perfect parody of Simon Heffer's style in Saturday's Telegraph turns out to have been written by, um, Heffer himself. First there's the now familiary 'elaborate words' error:
I thought Mayor Johnson of London was smart enough to avoid hostages to fortune, but his pledge to tackle knife crime has been followed by a hecatomb of stabbings in London since his election.
Once again, a hecatomb is a word derived from the ancient Greek hekatómbê meaning a sacrifice to the gods of 100 cattle (hecaton = one hundred). It is not a unit of general scale. Sheesh.
There's also a delightful peek into the Heffer view on law and order.
We are dealing with people who regard human life as dirt cheap, so locking them up with computer games and pornography and throwing away the key is hardly going to deter them. If whoever killed Jimmy Mizen, a harmless 16-year-old, last Saturday morning had thought he might instead go to the end of a rope, can we be so sure Jimmy would not be alive today?
...
Most judges do see the need to protect the public and to imprison criminals. If the Government is upset about this, it should simply construct more prisons - perhaps like PoW camps on our remoter islands.
Yup, lets kill some of them, and send the rest to the Falkland Islands. The smiling face of Hefferite conservatism.
posted by Tim J at
10:37 am
3 Comments:
"Yup, lets kill some of them".
Not quite as foolish, or as cruel as you imply. Capital punishment seems to be just, and neither a cruel or unusual punishment, at least, according to the latest American research. This shows clearly that the pronouncement of a death sentence is followed by a saving of 3 or 4 fewer murders, and that an execution is followed by a further decrease of murders. This is after years of being told by our government that there is no evidence of any deterrent effect of capital punishment. That same government promised when it abolished capital punishment that it would protect the public from violent criminals. Well we have seen violence and murder increase, even as the government swore that it was decreasing. We also had the right of armed self defence taken from us, only criminals now carry guns.
British people are slowly learning that their government does not care about their safety. But we are really stupid if we fail to learn from this new American research, which seems to have followed a rejection of a legal attempt to class execution by lethal injection as a "cruel and unusual punishment".
I agree that the death penalty can scarcely be considered unconstitutional when it was so much a part of the world conceived by the founding fathers. However, my beef with Heffer is more the unthinkingly relexive way that the re-introduction of the death penalty is proposed.
The stereotype of the hang 'em and flog 'em conservative is damaging enough without its manifestation rumbling away in the Telegraph every Saturday.
The Liberal stereotype is infinitly more damaging in the long run. Most on the Right would argue with conviction that our Western society is steadily degraded year on year as the Liberal chatterati and the politically correct NuLab Gramsciites erode our culture and destroy conservatism in it's true sense. The whole population of these islands has been brain washed steadily over the years since 1945. Now our electorate composed mainly by immigrants born overseas, benefits recipients, state employees and sinecure holders have voted overwhelmingly three times for the most inefficient, sleazy and corrupt government in memory. There was never any doubt of their worthlessness from day one when Blair appeared outside No. 10.
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