Legislate to control or punish to deter?

Most of us will have heard about the case of the nursery school worker who abused children under her care. I was listening to the radio on the way to University and was shocked at some of the measures proposed eg CCTV cameras in all nurseries, carers being forbidden to take mobile phones to work, even more checks on character and criminal record etc etc etc. The problem is that these measures will affect innocent people more than the guilty. The lady in question will receive, as punishment for her crimes, a short stint in prison, a criminal record and a new identity, courtesy of the taxpayer, after her release. All the multitude of innocent people will receive as punishment for being innocent, a lifetime of restrictions on their freedom! How does that add up?

Look at the case of the two lads who kicked a man to death in the street for no reason other than their drink fueled anger. They received 11 and 13 years. They will be out before they are 30 and can live their lives happily ever after. The rest of us will have to suffer further restrictions on our freedom by being told, if we make the dreadful mistake of going to the supermarket with our underage child, that we can't buy the alcohol we have in our basket or the recent one where a girl was told she couldn't by teaspoons because she was under 25!!!

So every time a crime happens, the government of the day decides to create more restrictions on the freedoms of the innocent in order to avoid the crime happening again. So the end result is that life loses any hint of pleasure and ends up a constant struggle to conform to the myriad of legislation meant to protect stop the guilty causing trouble.

I propose a better solution. Punish the criminals when caught. Put the lady who abused the children behind bars for life, not life sentence out in a few years or a few years sentence suspended, behind bars for life. The two yobs who kicked an innocent man to death? Bring back the death penalty. Execute them. Punish the guilty. Punish them so that other prospective criminals are deterred.

Of course people will cry "Oh but their human rights" and I reply that what does being a human mean? Simply that one is born in a human body? Or does being human entail a certain standard of behaviour below which, if you fall, you lose some of the perks and rights that other humans enjoy? I say that human rights are for those that behave like humans and not for those that don't. I am not saying torture and cause unnecessary pain beyond what is needed and just for the satisfaction of the people administering such punishment. But punish according to the crime.

Stop restricting the freedoms of the innocent in an attempt to catch any criminal before he can act. That has destroyed life for the rest of us. Instead punish the criminals. Life is life. It is so strange that the newspapers don't even have a rudimentary understanding of the English language. They always say "so and so was Jailed for life...." and then add "will serve a minimum of so many years..." In my book "Jailed for life" means just that. The newspapers should say that "so and so was sentenced to a life stigma for his crime but will serve X number of years for it". That would be the correct description of the event.

So how to stop the criminals? Deter them. Punish them. Severely and swiftly. That will deter enough from taking up crime. As it is now a person can murder and be out on the streets in 10 years. While the rest of us have to suffer this incredible intrusion of the state into every aspect of our personal life for the rest of time.

Wierd things on the way Glasgow

I went to Glasgow the other day. I was leaving from "London" Stansted, it took me over two hours to get there even though I live in London. We even have "London" Oxford. If that isn't taking the Mickey then what is? Some poor tourist will find out to his dismay, is that London doesn't always mean London just like Glasgow doesn't always mean Glasgow it sometimes means Prestwick.

Anyway, with time on my hands at the airport, I took a walk. I noticed a sign on top of a hole in the wall, next to the exchange office, "Free Cash" and underneath "Withdrawals". I went to the exchange office and asked the teller how I could get the "Free Cash". He thought it was quite funny.

Then I noticed a sign for a "Male" Toilet?!? I went in but the toilet just looked like any other toilet, it seemed gender neutral. I don't go into the "female" toilets but, urinals aside, I would think they would be the same as the male ones. When did toilets suddenly get a gender? How can you have a male toilet? You have a toilet that men go to but male toilet?

When I was driving back from Glasgow, at about 8pm I noticed one of the overhead illuminated signs said "50 Animals on Road" and underneath "Slow". As hard as I tried I didn't even see one animal let alone 50 and I don't need to be told that animals are slow, of course they are, at best you could expect 1 horsepower.

Thats all folks.

If you don't have enough bad news then why not import some?

The news has become a 24 hour phenomenon. It is almost as if we would all drop dead without it. Or the world would stop spinning, or something terrible. But this constant bombardment with news only began a couple of decades ago at most. Before that people used to read the newspaper, listen to the radio or watch the evening news and for the rest of the day get on with their own lives.

Consider what life would be like, for most of us, if we didn't ingest so much news every day. Take, for example, a person living in a small town somewhere in England (it could be any small town anywhere in the world, but we will consider one in England). Now what happens in small towns? They don't usually have murders every day, nor do they have rapes, nor earthquakes, or wars, or multiple death accidents, political scandals, celebrity scandals, hurricanes etc etc etc. Such events may happen now and then but rarely. When was growing up in a town in Scotland I don't remember anything momentous happening, save for the death of my father in a car accident.

What is my point? It is this, that we make our lives seem terrible simply by importing all the terrible news from all over the world. We just constantly remind ourselves of all the horrible things that are going on every day and by doing that we just get deeper and deeper into a misconception that the whole world is collapsing around us. Well it isn't. Because when we hear of a murder in a small town somewhere that was probably the only murder they had in the last 50 years. But because there is a murder happening every day or every hour or minute somewhere then we get to hear of murders happening constantly and so we think that the whole world has degenerated and is full of murderers, paedophiles, theives, yobs etc etc. It hasn't. 50 years ago we wouldn't have heard of all the crime happening in every single nook and cranny of the world. We would have heard about the crime happening in our town or county and in cases of sensational crimes, in the country and there would have been a serious crime every now and then and the rest of the time life would have been quite peaceful and normal, which it still is now!

The only difference now is that we immerse ourselves in bad news all day every day and wonder why we think the world is hell.

I tried an experiment for the last few weeks. I stopped listening to any news. I found two things happened. One, that life seemed to go on as before even though I didn't know what was going on (supposedly) and two I felt a lot better about my life. I began to see that life is not as bad as the news channels would like us to think it is. That there are good people around me. That good things are happening. That there are simple things in life that reward me with happiness even though a mass murderer went on a rampage in some obscure province in China and that even though I didn't know what was happening in the rest of the world I was still alive and well and, in fact, happier.

The fact of the matter is that we don't need to know most of the stuff we are force fed with grand journalistic sensationalism. We can get on fine without it. So why don't we go back to one or two news bulletins a day read by a guy at a desk without the special effects and then maybe we might notice that there are good things happening around us and the world is not the terrible place it is made out to be.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my weblog! I called it "Behind the Scenes" because I believe that there is a lot to learn from what goes on behind the stage presented to us by whoever presents things to us. I know that it has become almost a dirty word to even think about thinking that the present world leaders of society are anything other than altruistic philanthropists whose only concern is the well being of humanity, something like Mother Theresa's morphed into Gordon Brown, Obama, Sarkozy etc etc etc (I am obviously not too up to date on my political leaders as those are the only ones that come to mind at the moment, Oh! Mandeslson, how could I forget him?). But I am unwilling to accept that idea. This blog is just a forum to vent my thoughts about the world today. Maybe nobody will read them, maybe someone will, maybe those who do will think they are the senseless ravings of a lunatic, but when I do write I write from the heart. If you have any questions or comments feel free to send them to me. I am new to blogging so I don't know how it works, but if there is a possibility to post ideas sent in to me (with permission) then I am happy to do that. Anyway, enough welcoming, now I just have to find the time to write something. Hope to see you all soon, via my writing.

Vij