RE: Alright Moscow...Your Dark Little Secret Is Back

["Alan Partridge" <apartridge@turbonet.com>]

My apologies for David, who received the full burden of this message.

Hello!

Once again, I’d like to bring some ideas to the table, as it were, from
my brain to my fingers, and so forth.

It appears that there is some minor quibbling over whether hate crimes
should be punished more severely than those not deemed “hate crimes”. I
must say I disagree, in whole or part, with just about evereryone, so it
is nothing new if you disagree, it doesn't really matter anyway. The
fact of the matter is that the term “hate crime” has too many negative
connotations, and every one of them is different, maybe even by a hair,
from everyone else’s. We currently have classifications for murder. Is
this justifiable? I’d say so. I also say that the current system we have
is all wrong. People declared to be insane the moment they kill walk
free with a bit of psychiatric help on the way. Then you have a woman
who has her husband killed for insurance money, who is put away for
25-30 years. I won't even mention crimes of passion. I must say I’d
rather meet the woman who coolly calculated her husband’s death with
complete clarity of thought for a big win than chance upon meeting
someone who could suddenly lose his sense of reality and gouge out your
throat in the middle of a handshake.

Should people who commit hate crimes be punished more severely? Of
course they should. We are trying to limit the amount of unexpected
death, are we not? This activity doesn’t help society on the whole,
except for maybe by limiting the population somewhat. Those that are
declared insane enough to kill should be jailed and treated until they
are fit to enter society. The widow should be set free and admonished
severely, no more. I'd say the same for certain crimes of passion. How
likely is the rich widow going to kill if she’s denied any further
marriage licenses? Not very, in my estimation of things which as you can
all see by now is absolutely correct.

Where does it lead us if we say that the murder was driven by hatred of
a given class? Will we look upon our fellow man and say to ourselves,
“This person absolutely loathes gay people, could he/she be driven to
kill?” Or will we go back to our normal patterns and think, “This person
appears to hate gay people… perhaps he/she is overcompensating for the
fact that he/she is actually gay but won’t acknowledge it to
themselves?” Let us all learn to hate in an introverted way, as opposed
to killing. Learn to drown out those voices that others cannot hear,
telling you to kill. Either that, or burn an effigy of the person in
your back yard. Now, doesn’t that feel better? Nobody will prosecute
either, unless the fire spreads. People may be upset, but at least it
doesn’t carry equal weight with murder.

So to wrap up my point, let’s all stop being horrified by death and
recognize that it is a part of life. If we kill all of the killers, who
will be left to drive trucks of frozen rendered bovine carcasses to
MacDonald’s? And there was the other one, yes that’s right, you can
hate, but push it down so nobody can see it.

This has been Alan Partridge.
 -A non-representative of the BBC or its affiliates, at home or abroad

-----Original Message-----
From: David Camden-Britton [mailto:davidcb@turbonet.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2002 6:13 PM
To: vision2020@moscow.com
Subject: RE: Alright Moscow...Your Dark Little Secret Is Back

At 12:02 PM 9/17/02, Dale Courtney wrote:

What *is* perplexing to me is that those on the far-left somehow think
that someone's motivation for murder makes the murder even worse. So
what they have are "bad murderers" and "really bad murderers" -- as seen
by the degrees of punishment that they would require. 

Thank you for such a clearly-stated summary of the disagreeable notion
of "Hate crime" legislation. To quibble over the motives for murder or
violence seems foolish. Some person has had their life taken from them,
should that not be horrific enough to warrant punishment, regardless of
their sexual preference, taste in music, skin color, or religion? 

However, as was stated in an episode of "South Park", "If you're going
to hurt someone, you damn well better make sure they're the same color
as you are!"  


---
David Camden-Britton  -=)*(=-  davidcb@turbonet.com