Comments for seangabb.co.uk
Tony Hollick:
I've just finished reading For Your Own Good by Alice Miller.
She apparently believes in Freudianism. Hans Eysenck started driving a bulldozer through Freudianism in 1952, when he first published evidence that mental patients who were treated by Freudian therapists did not recover any faster than patients who were given no treatment at all. Anyone who still believes in it should read his book The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire, which came out in 1985.
Her theory that corporal punishment of children causes violence does not square with the empirical evidence from the real world. In the 1950s, everyone took corporal punishment for granted, but there was only a fraction of the amount of violent crime that there is today. I am not condoning cruelty to children, but I think we should use common sense to tell the difference between reasonable chastisement and excessive force. In my opinion, the most sensible rule is that punishment is excessive if it causes injuries which need medical treatment.
Nothing to do with Bill Thompson. There were no dubious circumstances. He was an adviser to the Home Office and other bodies on child pornography, and had what he thought was a licence to possess child pornography. I don't think he ever realised that a letter from a senior civil servant does not dispense with the law. It seems to have been all very unjust, but the law was against him.
This controversy started with the questions of child pornography and police corruption. Does it have anything to do with Bill Thompson, the sociologist who is on the LA Advisory Council? He used to be a lecturer at Reading University, but he left that job in dubious circumstances involving a large collection of child pornography, which he said he needed for his research. As far as I know, there was no question of the police planting it on him, because when they raided his office, they were acting on a complaint from someone at the university, possibly a secretary or a female student. In 1994, he wrote two books on sex, called Soft-Core and Sado-Masochism, in which he said that the Marquis De Sade was much-maligned and rape was really just exciting sex. With a mentality like that, it would not be surprising if there were complaints about him from women.
Anyone can make wild allegations about the UKIP, but where's your evidence? It doesn't take a genius to realise that the three old parties have a vested interest in smearing it. Allegations from those sources should be taken with a pinch of salt.
I'll publish a comment about Alice Miller's book when I've read it.
Adam Bell:
For some reason, I missed your comment.
You wrote:
"Rod Moore is right. Your glorious leader is obviously not a happy bunny, but when the UKIP blacklisted him, it was a classic case of chickens coming home to roost, and someone had to say so for his own good."
May I suggest that you read "For Your Own Good: The Origins of Violence in Child-Rearing" by Dr. Alice Miller
I don't have "glorious leaders", but Sean seems happy enough to me. Happiness is not the most important thing in life anyway, and anyone fighting for Human Rights is not guaranteed an entirely happy time.
To be "blacklisted" by the so-called "UKIP" should be treated as an honour. If you knew as much about "UKIP" as anyone of reasonable intelligence, you would run a country mile from it.
In the wildly unlikely event of it coming anywhere near electoral success, it will be deluged with wave after wave of scandals so hideous that even yourself and Mr. Moore would bitterly regret ever having had anything to do with it.
Regards,
Tony Hollick
Strange that in all these comments, no one has dared to argue against Sean Gabb's views on child pornography expressed in this article. So why are they so bad?
As for me, his reasoning seems sound, and surely even if you utterly detest child pronography, you can recognise that these laws are quite tyrannical. Indeed, I would say even worse than the drug laws in several ways.
Readers: please see the comments on FLC Nos. 47, 48, 150 and 152.
I don't think Tony would describe me as his "glorious leader". As for you, I am so desperately grateful for your rediscovery of the forgotten doctrine of classical liberalism that I want nothing more than to sit down with some of your voluminous writings.
Please do direct me to some of them. Please share your truths with us.
Tony Hollick:
Rod Moore is right. Your glorious leader is obviously not a happy bunny, but when the UKIP blacklisted him, it was a classic case of chickens coming home to roost, and someone had to say so for his own good.
You libertarians write off the UKIP as too socially conservative, but millions of people are socially conservative because they believe in freedom from crime, not freedom for criminals. When libertarians talk about the permissive society, they sound as if they want even more crime than we have got already.
Classical liberals are like social conservatives in a sense, because we have believed in freedom from crime ever since the 17th Century, when John Locke wrote Two Treatises of Government. The idea that criminals have more rights than victims is an innovation which only dates from the 1960s.
I used to regard myself as a libertarian at one time, and it was an easy mistake to make, because nine-tenths of libertarianism is derived from classical liberalism, and I only disagree with the other one-tenth of it. I eventually came to realise that if I salvaged the best parts of libertarianism and separated them from the dodgy stuff, I would, in effect, be rediscovering classical liberalism. You people in the LA have a lot of good ideas, but your chances of success are always sabotaged by your bad ideas.
Mr. H:
The principle of the rule of law means that the law must be clear enough to be understood by everyone, so that everyone knows in advance whether anything that they may decide to do is legal or not, and they do not have to wait to be taken to court to find out. A man can find out a girl's chronological age easily enough, but how is he supposed to work out her mental age?
If you believe that the ability to give informed consent is usually attained a few years after puberty, that's fair enough. You seem to be moving gradually towards my own point of view.
You do not have to be an authoritarian or a Colonel Blimp to believe that Western civilisation took a wrong turning in the 1960s. Since then, there has been approximately a twentyfold increase in crime, which speks for itself, and there have been big increases in all sorts of other social problems as well. Only last week, the Children's Society published a report by Stephen Scott of the London University Institute of Psychiatry, saying that more and more teenagers are suffering mental health problems because they are being forced to grow up too quickly. It seems to me that science is vindicating all the Eurosceptics who are also sceptical about the permissive society.
Mr. M:
I get my news primarily from "Google News" (culled from 4,500 publications, including the Guardian & the BBC Online; and a range of specialist sources. In fact, I loathe British paper newspapers, which are part of the Controlled Opposition, vehicles for police press releases and channels for scare-mongering. In every current affairs story I have personal knowledge of, they get the most basic facts wrong.
So I have no means of knowing if I write like a Guardian reader or not.
Likewise, I do not have any regard for "conventional opinion" and other subjectivist notions. My interest is in Human Rights, including the right to justice. The Separation of Powers is a cornerstone of Law, and it is quite clear that matters of _fact_ and _intent_ in any particular case must be decided by the Judicial Branch.
Consider Intelligence Quotients: these provide a metric for attained age over chronological age. While this is an inexact science, the existence of I.Q.s proves my point -- that individuals' capacity to reason and make judgements does not neatly correlate with chronological age.
Courts have had no great problems in determining whether or not individuals are too _young_ to know what they're doing. Asking for symmetry in the interests of justice is entirely fair and reasonable.
You think it is the Statutory age. I disagree because the ages of physical and mental maturity can vary independently and do not always correlate.
Neither am I advancing the attainment of puberty as a "cross-bar." I would _include_ it because it seems difficult to believe that fully-informed consent would be possible if the individual did not have some experience of sexuality.
I would ask you to note that I do not merely advocate User-Activated Radio Alarms for children (though that would be a good start): I advocate them for everyone. When people have signed up with the Rescue Service of their choice, we will have event-driven, user-driven policing in this country, which is more focused and efficient at protecting our Rights than the present Occupying Army of Social Control will ever be. In Iraq, contractors and the military will not go to work without them. Yet the Police Information Technology people here say with astonishment that they've never even heard of them!
Tony Hollick
Mr. H:
Being patronising and sarcastic does not prove anything. Please stop talking like a Guardian-reader and stick to the issues.
It has been 123 years since the age of consent in Britain was set at sixteen because of a scandal about child prostitution. In all that time, no one has ever objected to the law on the grounds that it conflicts with Montesquieu's principle of the separation of powers. Have you really spotted something that four or five generations of legal eagles have all missed, or are you barking up the wrong tree?
Separation of powers means that the legislature passes laws and the courts decide whether those laws have been broken in particular cases. That means that the legislature cannot pass a law saying that a given paedophile must have abused a given child, because he might not be a practising paedophile, or he might have abused other children but not that one. It does not mean that the legislature cannot pass a law banning sex with children as a general principle.
The courts do not have to decide whether sex with a child is likely to cause emotional damage, any more than they have to decide whether a bullet wound in the head is likely to cause paralysis or death. They can take that for granted. For that matter, the legislature can take it for granted as well. As you said yourself, the legislature cannot alter matters of fact by passing laws.
As I understand the comments that you made on 16th Apr., you think there is a certain age below which the capacity to give informed consent to sex does not exist, but above that age, the courts should decide the issue case-by-case. Fair enough. We only disagree about what that age is. You think it is the age of puberty. I disagree because the ages of physical and mental maturity can vary independently and do not always correlate.
Electronic alarms for children sound like a very useful idea. The only thing is that there are a lot more children than paedophiles, so you could argue that it is quicker to target the paedophiles than the children.
Mr. G:
The UKIP is a much bigger and more successful organisation than the LA, despite having been founded much more recently. Readers may judge for themselves who are the losers and who are the winners. The LA will never get anywhere if it remains stuck in a 1960s time warp like Edina and Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous.
Sean:
It is incorrect to say that my approach to this issue is in any way casual. One of the major reasons for my work on the development of Personalized Radio Alarms has been my concern for children, and their protection from attack or unwanted interference.
In the US, children at risk in the home are given Personalized Radio Alarms, so that they can instantly summon assistance if they are attacked or threatened. The deterrent value of these alarms shows up in the greatly reduced incidence of attacks and injuries.
The resources which have been wasted on "pedophile" scares and witch-hunts could instead have paid for Personalized Radio Alarms for every child in this country. By and large, children know when their well-being is threatened, and are competent to raise the alarm.
Rather than empty fulminations on insoluble problems, we could be giving very real protection to every child, especially protection from those in the same house. This is what I want to focus on. And I'm proud to say so.
Regards,
Tony Hollick
Mr. Moore:
Like most Right-wingers, you are somewhat blinkered and not very bright.
The reason I raised the issue of the Separation of Powers is because it is the cornerstone of English Law (as Kenneth Starr said).
You should go read Montesquieu's "The Spirit of the Laws" if you don't understand why. If you cannot be bothered to do this, you might look at the Wiki entry on the subject. If you cannot be bothered to do either, you're not worth talking with. I'm not about to give you a free legal education.
Let us suppose that the Legislature decides in its wisdom to enact a Statute mandating 3 as the value of pi. Not only is this not true; it would bring ruin to any manufacturing country which tried to put it into effect. This is because the value of a particular constant is a matter of _fact_, which cannot simply be dictated by the Legislature.
Nonetheless, a Legislature in the US did exactly this...
Accordingly, the Constitution, under the Separation of Powers forbids the Legislature pretending to know facts in particular matters in advance. The Legislature might wish to enact a Stature saying that all people named "Roderick Moore" shall be treated as guilty of any offences of which they are charged, _irrespective of the evidence_. You would very soon wish that the Separation of Powers was invoked so that you would be tried in an impartial Court on the particular facts of your case.
So-called "Age of Consent" statutes break the prohibition on the legislature presuming to know the particular facts of the case when events have not even occurred.
Capacity to consent is a _factual_ matter, to be determined by a jury.
Tony Hollick
I don't share Tony's relaxed view about the age of consent. But what he is saying is very much within the libertarian mainstream. If it causes UKIP to take an even firmer line against the LA, I would suggest that UKIP is by far the bigger loser.
Mr. Moore:
Like most Right-wingers, you are somewhat blinkered and not very bright.
The reason I raised the issue of the Separation of Powers is because it is the cornerstone of English Law (as Kenneth Starr said).
You should go read Montesquieu's "The Spirit of the Laws" if you don't understand why. If you cannot be bothered to do this, you might look at the Wiki entry on the subject. If you cannot be bothered to do either, you're not worth talking with. I'm not about to give you a free legal education.
Let us suppose that the Legislature decides in its wisdom to enact a Statute mandating 3 as the value of pi. Not only is this not true; it would bring ruin to any manufacturing country which tried to put it into effect. This is because the value of a particular constant is a matter of _fact_, which cannot simply be dictated by the Legislature.
Nonetheless, a Legislature in the US did exactly this...
Accordingly, the Constitution, under the Separation of Powers forbids the Legislature pretending to know facts in particular matters in advance. The Legislature might wish to enact a Stature saying that all people named "Roderick Moore" shall be treated as guilty of any offences of which they are charged, _irrespective of the evidence_. You would very soon wish that the Separation of Powers was invoked so that you would be tried in an impartial Court on the particular facts of your case.
So-called "Age of Consent" statutes break the prohibition on the legislature presuming to know the particular facts of the case when events have not even occurred.
Capacity to consent is a _factual_ matter, to be determined by a jury.
Tony Hollick
Tony Hollick:
Paedophilia is not a red herring. In case you've forgotten, the UKIP ostracised Sean Gabb for his opinions about child pornography, which was how this discussion started.
As for the distinction between statute laws and case-by-case judgments, you were the one who brought up that subject. I never mentioned it.
You are wrong to treat Kinsey as irrelevant, because without him, the idea that paedophilia is harmless would never have got off the ground, and people like Peter Tatchell would not be defending sex with pre-pubertal children in the first place. In 1980, Tom O'Carroll, the leader of the Paedophile Information Exchange, wrote a book called Paedophilia: The Radical Case, which was almost entirely based on the Kinsey Reports.
It is a bad idea to treat the age of puberty as the age at which informed consent to sex becomes possible, because according to the latest research, the age of physical maturity is declining, while the age of mental maturity is staying the same. Possible causes of the decline in the age of puberty include pollutants in the environment, stress due to family breakdown, and sexual stimulation from the media.
I'm afraid that your contributions to this discussion are going to make the UKIP even more determined to ostracise the LA.
Rod Moore:
English Common Law provides a perfectly satisfactory "Age of Consent" law: i.e. According to the Separation of Powers, such a matter must be judged by a judge and jury on a case-by-case basis, on the questions of (a) Capacity to consent of the individual in the case; and (b) whether consent actually was given, if the individual was capable of giving it. The concept of "consent" in law is quite clear; that consent must be informed consent. A person cannot meaningfully consent to that which they do not understand.
So your very large and very smelly red herring of "Age of Consent" statutes violates the most basic principles of justice: that people should not be penalized where they have done no wrong to another.
To make it quite clear to you how absurd such statutes are: An innocent individual could be convicted of a serious "crime", while the "victim" in the case could be convicted for aiding and abetting.
Like Sean, I could be less interested in Kinsey, Mead etc. My interest is in facts and legal principles, as determinable by juries.
A man of 21 might be incapable of informed consent. A woman of 30 might be incapable of informed consent. A thirteen-year-old girl might be capable of informed consent, but declined to give it in a particular case.
Give up now, Mr. Moore. Your present position violates the most fundamental principles of justice.
You should note that I do not advocate people of _any_ age having sex together. Such advocacy would seem both bizarre and unnecessary.
"Paedophilia" as clinically understood consists of adults having sex with pre-pubertal children. (This definition is necessary to avoid the issue that sexual attraction between people with sexual capacity is innate and normal, so that it cannot be a paraphilia). It is quite rare.
Flirting with understatement, I find it difficult to believe that a pre-pubertal individual could give informed consent to a sexual act such as would satisfy a jury.
I trust that you now understand the legal issues involved, and that you will now abandon an intellectually and morally indefensible position.
Regards,
Tony Hollick
Tony Hollick:
I would not call Ludovic Kennedy a right-wing fantasist. My impression is that he is more of a politically correct Guardianist. I know he once made some very rude remarks about Margaret Thatcher. Actually, the Home Office report cited below by Sean makes the same point that Kennedy made in his books, because Tim Newburn says quite a lot about the "Dirty Harry problem", that is, police officers breaking the rules to convict people whom they believe to be guilty, not frame people whom they know to be innocent.
Perhaps you were thinking of Judith Reisman. Her conclusion that Alfred Kinsey was a charlatan was confirmed independently by James Jones, whose biography of Kinsey came out in 1997. He is not a right-winger either, because he first became famous for exposing the Tuskegee scandal, in which white doctors from Alabama used black patients as human guinea-pigs.
Peter Tatchell said in 1997 that he wanted to legalise sex with nine-year-old children. Nine-year-olds having sex with each other all the time? Which fantasy world are you living in, Mr. Hollick?
Rod Moore:
I had a good friend who worked as a Detective with Harry Challenor at West End Central. Challenor got kicked out for planting a brick in a demonstrator's pocket, in a famous case.
My friend told me they fixed the evidence in 95% of all the cases they brought to Court. If they couldn't get people any other way, they planted drugs on them. (As for drug busts, they only charged people with half the amount, keeping the other half in police lockers for future plantings). My friend got sick of it, and moved to another Station.
The way the police work is to wait for their "informants" to tell them who might be doing naughty things. Armed with this "intelligence", they find (or arrange to find) "evidence" that the accused will be found guilty on. Informants inform for all the usual reasons: malice; blackmail by the police; cupidity; power trips; take your pick.
I have no criminal record. I carry with me a business card of a competent defence solicitor, who will attend an interview at 2 in the morning (and did). I advise everyone to do the same. The most recent PC I advised said "Thanks!" and put the card in their pocket.
You live in a Right-wing fantasy world, Mr. Moore. Interestingly, nearly every other Right-winger I meet has a "police" story to tell.
Only too easy for left-wing informants to denounce them for something, anything.
Most of the kids are busy having sex with each other. I think I can safely say that they know what they're doing. They've been at it for years.
Regards,
Tony
Sorry you feel like that. To be perfectly frank, you suffer from tunnel vision on your pet subjects, and you cannot tell when you are being your own worst enemy.
I'm not getting involved in providing cases of police ocrruption. But I don't need to. Here is a Home Office report that admits the police are corrupt:
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds...dfs/
fprs110.pdf
I could doubtless find others if I spent more than 30 seconds with Google. But I won't.
I have no opinions on the Kinsey Report. My opinions are independent of whatever it claims.
As for Peter Tatchell, I agree with him on some issues - the immorality of the Iraq War, for instance - and I disagree with him on others.
Now, unless you can state a case worth answering, rather than festoon this page with various types of innuendo, that is the end of my discussion with you.
Fri. 28th Mar. 2008.
Speaking to people whom you disagree with is one thing. Publishing their articles, calling them "one of us", and urging people to vote for them in elections is something else.
The idea that paedophilia is harmless is a myth based on the Kinsey Reports, which we now know were faked, thanks to the work of Judith Reisman. Instead of collaborating with undesirables, you should be making the point that if there were free markets in higher education and scientific research, it would be much harder for charlatans like Alfred Kinsey to get away with it, because there would be more rivalry between different schools of thought, and they would subject each other's theories to more critical scrutiny.
As for hatred of foreigners, I have never met a UKIP member who was actually xenophobic in the dictionary definition of the word, and if any member had expressed those sort of opinions, I am sure the Eurofanatics would have made sure everyone knew about it. I suspect that the whole idea is a smear invented by the Guardian-reading classes.
On the subject of the police, it would help if you gave us the evidence for your allegations, or told us where it has been published. Incidentally, Ludovic Kennedy's last book on miscarriages of justice was Thirty-Six Murders and Two Immoral Earnings, which came out in 2002, not 1969.
I fail to see how the opinions of those I associate with can be ascribed to me. You might as easily tell Peter Tatchell and Nettie Pollard that because I associate with people who dislike the European Union simply because it is foreign, I am myself a xenophobe.
And,by the way, just because I may not agree with people on all they believe does not mean I should stop speaking to them.
As for "honest mistakes" by the police, where have you been since 1969? These people are corrupt. They are oppressive. They used to take delight in beating up and framing blacks. Now their paymasters have sent down new instructions, they have turned on the rest of us. They are pigs. Whether they are fascists depends on how you might classify the new order of things. They should certainly be abolished.
Wed. 26th Mar. 2008.
Dear Sean,
You deny that you want to legalise sex with children, and you are very indignant that some UKIP members think that you do, but the LA has a history of collaboration with Peter Tatchell and Nettie Pollard, who hold different opinions on that subject. There is a saying that if you hang around with dirty dogs, it's your own fault if you get fleas.
Just one more thing. Whenever you get onto the subject of the police, you sound like a Guardian-reader who thinks they are all pigs and fascists. Ludovic Kennedy spent many years exposing miscarriages of justice and writing books about them, and he only ever found one case in which corrupt police officers deliberately framed a man whom they knew to be innocent. (That was a murder by armed robbers in Luton in 1969.) Every other case started with an honest mistake by the police.
Yours sincerely,
Rod Moore.
This all seems very regrettable. I have been reading your blog (don't deny it) for years, and I have to say if anyone deserves a turn at the EU trough, it's you.
On a serious point, though, why do you think children beneath a certain age cannot give consent to sexual acts?
I don't even know how you could think that in the literal sense. Clearly they can? Surely you just think (like most people and for what seems to most to be a good reason) that their consent should be ignored.
I notice you have a link to Sarah Fitz-Claridge's site. She has argued for years (or at least did argue for years) that there should be no age of consent laws. Do you have a response to her arguments in e.g. http://
www.takingchildrenserious...hts_and_the_law ?
Incidentally, I like the way your (to me) rather half-hearted position on children seems to offend literally everyone. Extremism has its virtues!
Maybe you could email me if you don't want to tarnish your political reputation further. 
These people want to leave the European Union - and I agree with them. But what is their vision for an independent country? ....Others probably have no vision at all, beyond a vague belief that we can all go back to the good old days of the 1950s.
Aye, there's the rub. Same as the BNP, the only difference is one of class (UKIP = bourgeois, BNP = prole). I don't want to go back to the 1950s. It isn't possible anyway. The human material is simply not there for that kind of society. We are at that inflection point that Rome experienced between Republic and Principate that Shakespeare dramatised in Julius Caesar. The point at which it should be obvious to even the dull-witted that we are no longer dealing with "free men" but with a plebeian rabble. Even if UKIP could galvanise support they would only attract Cassiuses and Cascas. And even if the speeches talk of "freedom" this word has no real meaning to men who wouldn't know what freedom really was or what to do with it if it dropped on top of them. Much as I sympathise with the ethno-cultural type that UKIP attracts for my own reasons, it's pure folly to believe that they represent a vital force capable of any real political effects.
Two days! That was brief.
Kilroy took months!
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