I read the news today, oh boy.
Um, yeah...
All this stuff in the media about Jon Venables going back to prison, and about how we deserve to know why. Why do we deserve to know, exactly? Surely the fact that he's back behind bars is enough. I'm not even sure that's relevant, or if it should be in the news.
The thing is... laws exist for a reason. They stop chaos, and they stop us from eating each other because it sounds like a laugh, or whatever. These laws have been accumulated and tweaked over hundreds of years, and they work, for the most part.
And when they don't work, you know about it. If they are unworkable, they soon fall by the wayside. If they are unfair, there is unrest. Real unrest, not just media induced outrage.
Media induced outrage is not a reason to change the law, or ignore it for 'just one special case'. Because for the most part the media doesn't give a shit about what was done to James Bulger, except in so much as they can use it to sell papers and whip up a frenzy of outrage that they hope will sell them more papers if said outrage leads to the outcome they pronounced as being right and just.
The laws of this country or any other are not perfect, but public outrage and emotion is not the time when exceptions should be made. It's precisely the time when exceptions should not be made, and precisely why so much effort has gone into making the laws in the first place. The family of a murder victim are not the right people to dictate sentencing, no matter how gruesome the crime was. These are precisely the times when we have to stick to what is written down, because the ultimate progression of the alternative is a lynch mob, which could well turn out to be as gruesome.
All this stuff in the media about Jon Venables going back to prison, and about how we deserve to know why. Why do we deserve to know, exactly? Surely the fact that he's back behind bars is enough. I'm not even sure that's relevant, or if it should be in the news.
The thing is... laws exist for a reason. They stop chaos, and they stop us from eating each other because it sounds like a laugh, or whatever. These laws have been accumulated and tweaked over hundreds of years, and they work, for the most part.
And when they don't work, you know about it. If they are unworkable, they soon fall by the wayside. If they are unfair, there is unrest. Real unrest, not just media induced outrage.
Media induced outrage is not a reason to change the law, or ignore it for 'just one special case'. Because for the most part the media doesn't give a shit about what was done to James Bulger, except in so much as they can use it to sell papers and whip up a frenzy of outrage that they hope will sell them more papers if said outrage leads to the outcome they pronounced as being right and just.
The laws of this country or any other are not perfect, but public outrage and emotion is not the time when exceptions should be made. It's precisely the time when exceptions should not be made, and precisely why so much effort has gone into making the laws in the first place. The family of a murder victim are not the right people to dictate sentencing, no matter how gruesome the crime was. These are precisely the times when we have to stick to what is written down, because the ultimate progression of the alternative is a lynch mob, which could well turn out to be as gruesome.