It is insane that an MP promoting a Bill to ban smacking one's own children is completely unable to distinguish between smacking and beating, between smacking and violence. Insane, just insane.
Her Bill she said removes "an excuse for violence towards children," and it does it by criminalising those who, in her words, "beat, assault and hit their children.
" This is how she characterises smacking: as beating, assaulting and hitting children.
But smacking is not violence, smacking is not beating or assaulting children -- failing to distinguish between smacking and violence is a failure to distinguish at all -- and a failure too to understand that there are already laws on the books against beating, assaulting or inflicting violence against children, but those who do beat their children simply ignore them. A new law criminalising smacking is utterly unlikely to influence those parents who do inflict violence towards children; instead, it will criminalise parents who don't.
UPDATE 1: I was interested in this comment below: " Smacking is morally wrong, as is a ban on smacking." Some people won't understand that comment, so a link to this article might help, explaining . As the author Mark Skousen says, "persuasion instead of force is the sign of a civilized society.
" Read the piece to see just what he means. It's not quite what you think. ;^)
UPDATE 2: Given that Bradford is a Green MP, would anyone like to explain the connection between the environment, and having smacking banned?
UPDATE 3: You may choose to take it or leave it, but if you're struggling to answer the above question with anything other than "no idea," then the explanation is surely that she's not in the Green Party for the environmental politics. This, remember, is the woman who left Anderton's hard-left New Labour Party in 1990 because she saw a "definite move to the right."
Two blogs have some relevant background:
Writing at his Whoar blog last year in the midst of the Greens's co-leader's contest, .
[Punctuation has been somewhat cleaned up to make it readable.]
I’d like to finish with what I think is a telling anecdote. I was present when Sue Bradford and Catherine Delahunty made their first appearance at a green party meeting, this after both being hounded out of the alliance part of the alliance by Jim Anderton -- it was at his feet they learnt their organisational ‘chops’(and it shows.
..) -- the left are very ‘top-down,’ bordering on control freaks.
The Green Party at that time was a very low-key affair, [with] meetings held in the low-roofed attic of a bookshop on K. Road. At this meeting, Bradford said to me out of the corner of her mouth (I had known her for some years) that “this party is ripe for taking over” -- and she wasn’t wrong.
Later in that same evening I approached the then-leader of the Auckland Greens (a lovely lady but lacking that political killer-will), and told her that “that woman over there is going to take your job." This duly came to pass.
And if Trevor Loudon is correct in his five-part exegesis of Bradford's history, the environment was the last thing on Bradford's mind for which she was "taking over" the Green Party: , , , , .
Her Green party bio states: There are three ways to make radical social and environmental change. 1) Working within the system; 2) throwing rocks at the system from outside; 3) building new organisations within the shell of the old system.
Which of those three ways do you think she is working on here with her anti-smacking Bill?
She is intent on removing parents' hands from their own children; but she has no problem with governments getting their hands on children's minds, or even getting her hands on them herself -- as Catherine Delahunty, her co-trustee at the Kotare School -- "a centre for radical and liberating education for social change," she says -- makes clear enough in . .
RELATED: , ,
The French have long been far less likely than their UK counterparts to run in disgust from a woman old enough to be, well, their first wife...Three solutions to gun crime in the UK. Would you like to rank them from most ineffectual (but headline grabbing) up to most effective?Over there, actresses in their 50s and 60s (Charlotte Rampling (right), Jane Birkin, Catherine Deneuve (left)) still attract love-interest roles as a matter of course; over here they'd be lucky to land the role of "put-upon mum" in a gravy advert. Likewise, the French applauded when presidential candidate Segolene Royal, 53, was snapped in a bikini on a beach - none of the childish barfing of our press when poor Cherie B is pictured in a one-piece or when even Jerry Hall was teased for her cellulite. Then there was the Paris Match photo spread of Arielle Dombasle, 53, wife of philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, featuring the singer-actress on all fours wearing a silver thong, at one point studiously adjusting her nipples.
Following the deaths by shooting of four young men in London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced harsher penalties for shooting people.
Monsters and Critics.com -
18 hours ago
London - Following the deaths by shooting of four young men in London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced harsher penalties for possessing firearms.
And in another universe, in which the UK followed the advice of :
We believe the best action would be to relegalise guns and let ordinary people fight back with lethal force against the violent criminals who presently rule the streets of our cities.To help you in your decision, Dr Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance points out on behalf of beleaguered Britons: "We have the most restrictive laws in Europe on gun ownership...
These have plainly not worked. In 1968, in 1988, and twice in 1997, we were promised a safer country if only we gave up our guns. We were cheated.
In fact, the only people who have no guns are the respectable."
So which is it? Which solution would be the most effective?
And which the least?
LINKS: - Pacific Empire
- Dr Sean Gabb, Libertarian Alliance, UK
RELATED: ,
I'm with I/S here when he argues,
none of us have to read the crap if we don't want to - and I generally don't. Likewise simply because blogging as an institution has no standards doesn't mean that we all have to wallow in the sewer. The freedom to adopt whatever standards we choose means we can also choose to have some rather than none.I like to think I'm doing the same here, albeit with a rather different barrow.Unlike Span, I am trying to use my blog to push a political barrow. As I've said before, democracy is , and if you want your views to be taken into account, you have to speak up for them. That's what I'm doing here.
I am also, in a small way, trying to change minds and influence opinion. The difference between this and some other blogs is that I choose to maintain some basic intellectual standards in doing so.
Feel free to comment below on either my barrow or my standards.
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