Pigdogfucker

Obsolete makes sense:

[This is] why Sophie Lancaster’s mother hasn’t received the overwhelming sympathy or coverage that Helen Newlove did; she happened to [be] a youth worker who believed in compassion, letting live and and forgiving, and despite initial and understandable soul-searching about whether she could continue in such a job, she’s decided she will. Contrast that to Newlove: the woman out not for justice, but for apparent vengeance, who gives the kind of quotes the tabloids adore, such as saying how she’d give her husband’s killers the lethal injection herself, while demanding that new, deeply authoritarian and illiberal laws be brought in to stop such youths killing in the future.

When met with individuals who don’t want to pursue a vendetta, or even, God forbid, forgive their tormentors, as Anthony Walker’s mother famously did, they don’t understand it or consider it worthy of further coverage, except to ask how they possibly could do such a thing. The embittered and angry always make for better copy than the reflective ones who want to move on.

I’d agree wholeheartedly, and add Liz Longhurst to the list of the vindictive, vendetta tabloid-tacular side. And of course, this fuels the cycle of hatred, has contributed to everyone being more afraid of crime than they should be, and generally makes the world a worse place for all concerned. While I’m not a Christian, getting rid of “eye-for-eye” and substituting “turn the other cheek” is quality inspirational genius, and is pretty much the foundation of everything that’s good, decent and worth keeping about western civilisation.

On a more personal basis, the people I love know my views about This Sort Of Thing, and are sane liberals rather than deranged medievalists; it’s disappointing to think that in the extremely unlikely event that I were to become the victim of a vile murder, they’d be more or less completely ignored in favour of people who wanted to eviscerate children [*] live on TV…

[*] it’s weird – if anyone other than Helen Newlove were to go public about their desire to kill children, they’d find themselves at best a social pariah and probably in a loony bin within a few days…

It’s National Tackling Drugs Week. Let’s all go tackle some drugs…