...It is important to state that it is not communities that commit crimes but individuals. Those convicted are squarely Henry Long, Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, not thousands of innocent people who share their heritage. Tarring all Travellers with the brush of these men’s callousness is as unfair as tarring all Catholics for paedophile priests or all eskimos for daft militant wog attacks.
Yet to completely ignore the cultural context of this crime is wrong. Henry Long, the ringleader, was removed from school at the age of 12; he followed his father and grandfather into the thieving “trade”. Albert Bowers left school at 11 and before the trial had already picked up three youth convictions. These young men could not read or write. For years they had not known school or structure. Their education was in petty crime.
Such problems do not solely beset Travellers but they are far more prevalent among Traveller communities. If we want to be a country where all are treated the same, where all live by the same rules and where the state does its best to furnish each with a decent chance in life, we have to end the squeamishness that prevents open talk about Travellers. This squeamishness is down to two fears. First, the fear of retribution. After the verdict on PC Harper’s death it emerged that the judge, Mr Justice Edis, brought the first trial to a temporary halt over an alleged potential plot to intimidate jurors. Extra security measures were brought in. Jurors were referred to by number not name. One juror was dismissed for acting oddly in court, mouthing pleasantries at the defendants. Whether she was motivated by misplaced friendliness or fear of someone up in that public gallery we do not know, but most will not be shocked by revelations of intimidation.
The fear of the bullet, the knife, the burnt-out car; this helps the lawless elements of Traveller culture maintain a certain power, and gives the law-abiding majority of Travellers a terrible name.
The second fear is that of being labelled racist. Since the Equality Act 2010 recognised Gypsy, Roma and Travellers as ethnic minorities, race has been used to shield this culture from due scrutiny. Sensible questions about why those within these groups are more likely to be in prison, more likely to be illiterate or more likely to suffer domestic violence prompt cries of racism. In April a Channel 4 Dispatches programme titled The Truth About Traveller Crime was dubbed “dehumanising” by activists and investigated by Ofcom. Desperate not to offend, the authorities turn a culturally sensitive blind eye.
The fears hush most into silence, and the silence means the stand-off between Travellers and the rest of society continues uneasily. Many feel disquieted to see the mobile homes rolling on to a local beauty spot, a portent too often of littering, mess, anti-social behaviour. Meanwhile those in Traveller communities are hardly “living their best lives”. Travellers die about ten years earlier than the rest of us. They have higher rates of chronic illness. Their suicide rates are six times higher.
You might argue that they choose to live like this, but the babies born into that life don’t. Many are destined to repeat the same pattern: leave school in your early teens, drift into a life of odd jobs and petty crime, never move beyond the circles you were raised in. As long as the culturally sensitive force-field exists around Travellers, these children are abandoned to a fate that should not be tolerated in 21st-century Britain.
It is a scandal that some Gypsy and Traveller children are taken out of school at primary age; that some start work as young as ten; that about 65 per cent of Traveller children are persistently absent from school; that they have the lowest attainment of all ethnic groups throughout their school years and are far more likely to be excluded. Are we to be surprised when they choose crime?
>>34069 I've just seen your post. If nothing I see is the truth, your statement is false, so what now? At least one thing I see if the truth? Everything I see is the truth? Nothing I see is the ..untruth?
Offenders whose crimes lead to the death of an emergency service worker in the line of duty will receive mandatory life sentences under a new law brought about after the death of a police officer, Andrew Harper.
The ruling, announced by the government, follows a two-year campaign by Lissie Harper, whose husband was killed while answering a late-night burglary call. She previously said she was “outraged” by the sentences handed to the three teenagers responsible for his death. The new legislation, named Harper’s law, will make it on to the statute books through an amendment to the existing police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, and is likely to take effect early next year.
>>36016 Nobody likes scum, of course, but this law really feels like it goes too far. Especially for the police, who have received a lot of bad PR recently precisely because of all the bad things they often do as part of their job. Now it's a mandatory life sentence if you fight back too hard. That's really very despotic indeed.
>>36020 I thought a couple of cops died in the miners's strike. If not, then that really suggests this law is not necessary. Remember that this law does not include mandatory life sentences for police who kill innocent people, which happens unacceptably often.
The article states that the officer was "caught in a strap", which suggests an accident. Indeed the robbers were cleared of murder (which requires intent), and convicted of manslaughter (which does not).
Would this new law have prevented his death? Would the quad bike raiders have stopped to consider the possible life sentence before carelessly driving away? I see no evidence to suggest this.
Is it not a foundational principal of our society that the same laws apply to everyone, including agents of the state? Not in the mind of our home secretary.
>>36027 Agents of the state being allowed to murder and rape while undercover is still in the bill, I believe. Or was that one already passed? It's hard to keep up.
>>36016 How broadly is "lead to" construed as?
if someone shoplifts and the police are called, and the policeman responding is hit by a bus while crossing the road from the car park to the shop is there a chance the shoplifter could find that they're going down for life because a contrived "well if you hadn't done that, this wouldn't have happened" interpretation is possible?
>Anti-hate groups including the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Auschwitz Memorial and Hope Not Hate have condemned Jimmy Carr for his comments about the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community in his Netflix special. The show, called His Dark Material, was released on Christmas Day but received widespread attention on Friday after a clip was posted and shared online.
>Carr said: “When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of 6 million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.”
Weird that an ethnic group facing legislation that allows the government to confiscate their homes and separate their families might be sensitive about something like that.
I get it's a joke, but would anyone be defending him if he'd done the same joke but about the Jews? Nobody but literal nazis. I think that says something.
It's only a joke if we understand that killing gypsies is bad. If we all agree that killing gypsies is fine, it's just a statement and completely devoid of humour. The press seem unwilling to recognise that sometimes jokes aren't literal statements and sometimes people say things they don't believe for comedic effect.
Also, the joke was substantially contextualised by the material around it, but (of course) that context hasn't been given by the press.
Along similar lines, my all-time favourite joke:
Abortion is a sensitive and difficult issue and I'm really not sure what to think, because there are reasonable points on both sides of the argument. I'm all for murdering babies, but I don't like the idea of women having choices.
That's not a joke if you believe me to be a pro-infanticide misogynist. You may or may not find it funny, but to recognise it as being a joke rather than an unpleasant opinion you have to acknowledge that the punchline does not actually represent my beliefs.
I've heard the opinion expressed from actual jewish people that they shouldn't be exempt from this kind of humour, not only because it sets a difficult precedent about some people being a protected group, but also in the case of jews it plays right into the hands of all the tinfoil types who think they secretly run the world.
Personally I just don't think it takes more than a broad MLK style commitment to the idea of universalism, but in this day and age that's not good enough and you have to go along with all kinds of mental gymnastic tripe to justify a fucking joke. But there we are.
>>36845 >but in this day and age that's not good enough and you have to go along with all kinds of mental gymnastic tripe to justify a fucking joke
A half thought: The other side of this is that people want to have it both ways. (Whether it applies to Carr is a separate question.) We're half-in-half on a society that thinks saying something edgy makes you a dick, and nowadays that's something most people know or ought to know. But people want to keep saying edgy things without being thought of as a dick, and even if saying edgy things doesn't inherently make you a dick, even if that's arbitrary, saying edgy things knowing it's considered a dick thing to do still makes you a bit of a dick.
The transgressive element isn't the only appeal of edgy humour, but it definitely adds to it. And it's not like being a dick is the worst thing in the world - you can say "Yeah, I acted like a dick in order to make people laugh" easily enough. Yet there are a lot of times where you get the impression someone wants to be a daredevil without putting themselves in harm's way. They want the credit for jumping the bike over all the burning schoolbuses but they've got absolutely no interest in the fact that sometimes you fall off the bike and cut your arm or land a bit hard and feel like you've had a kick in the balls.
I agree with this, yeah. If you're going to make callous jokes then you're going to have to expect backlash.
I also think the comedian's "character" matters a lot, and a big part of the problem for Carr is that his character is a bit ambiguous. "It's just a joke" isn't as convincing when it's being voiced by a slick, put-together stand-up persona.
Contrast that with Jerry Sadowitz, an ageing magician weirdo who is equally as vicious towards himself as any other target. You don't take what he says as seriously when you realise that he's speaking through a character. Same for Are Stew, whether you like him or not, he is at pains to totally undermine himself (and his stereotypical audience) in many of his standup acts, starting out smug and clever then working up to a self-loathing mental breakdown.
It probably doesn't help that Carr takes many of his jokes from writers, i.e. a writer might think this is a brilliant one-liner without considering how it might come across in context. We understand that when someone like Chris Morris says,
>Luckily, the amount of heroin I use is harmless. I inject about once a month on a purely recreational basis. Fine. But what about other people less stable, less educated, less middle-class than me? Builders or blacks for example.
he's being absurd for the sake of satirising elitist news media. When Sadowitz makes a joke about the Holocaust, we mostly twig on from the vulgarity and outright self-deprecation that he's speaking through a character, and that it's not about the actual target as much as the taboo.
For Carr, though? He's not an "outsider" figure and there doesn't seem to have any deeper satirical motivation or meaning in his work. I think people are mostly willing to accept dark or even outright nasty humour, if they understand and agree with where it's coming from and why. Yeah, maybe it's true that some people don't care whether these jokes come from a joke jukebox like Carr or a more carefully crafted act, but I certainly don't think people are wrong to react skeptically towards him, because a comedian has to earn the trust of the audience.
The other side of this coin is that when you go see a comedian like Carr, who you've seen on the telly making some pretty edgy jokes for Countdown, of all things, you likely know this is the sort of thing you're in for.
Or to use a more extreme example, Frankie Boyle. I never liked him myself, but the man's whole shtick was just being a cunt, so you can hardly complain when you go to see him and end up hearing something a cunt might say.
To go back to Are Stew even. He was near exiled for his role in the Jerry Springer Opera, which seriously offended a lot of Christians. He was effectively cancelled before cancel culture was a thing, and had to rebuild from scratch. That series of events have profoundly shaped who he is as a modern comedian, but his personal thoughts on comedy still very much lean towards the freedom of artistic expression. I'd recommend giving his books a read, he talks very candidly about his comic persona.
At the end of the day what it comes down to is that nobody is making you watch a certain comic. Nobody is making you watch a certain TV show. You can safely ignore it and pay attention to something else. Twenty years ago I'm pretty confident you'd all agree with that line of reasoning if it was Christians trying to shut down a heavy metal band, or moralist conservatives trying to ban a movie or videogame.
The strange development of the social media age is that we largely seem to have conceded that ground in recent years, and perversely, people claiming to be of liberal/leftist leanings have discovered the power of a good moral outrage. But it's still the same thing, and it's still bollocks.
It's just the shamelessness of the press in finding stories that don't require them to leave their desk.
Watch some edgy comedians, pick out a joke that someone might be offended by, ring up some professionally offended people and ask "are you offended by this offensive joke" and bingo, you've got a splash. Play your cards right and it can run for a week with reaction and counter-reaction. It's the most literal sort of manufactured outrage.
It's just the Lenny Bruce situation all over again, but with journalists in the audience taking notes.
>>36857 I saw Jimmy Carr about 10 years ago. The only joke I remember from his routine was this:
When I was a kid I was afraid of the dentist.
He was a paedophile.I won't tell you how many fillings he gave me.
I doubt his routine has changed much from that. It was never much of an act, he just stood there and fired off one bad taste joke after another. He may have even used the statistics show that 9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape line as well, thinking about it.
From what I can tell, his show was released on Netflix in December and barely anyone watched it so they decided to publicise some of the more offensive material to get attention and it worked. I think they did the same for Dave Chappelle and his trans jokes.
>Horrified families claim their stay at a "luxury" theme park resort was ruined when "out of control" travellers reportedly trashed the campsite, left a tot with a black eye and pooed in the showers.
Gypsies set up camp on university land, and like clockwork the Co-Op opposite has a security guard. They only ever need security guards when gypsies turn up. Is that an act of racism on Co-Op's part by responding to nearby gypsy incursion with beefed up security?
>>38777 You should spread flyers informing the student body of this racism and watch the chaos unfold.
I don't envy that security guard. It sounds like a great way to get your car torched and to be utterly powerless to actually do anything beyond provoke a fuck-ton of aggro over a sandwich or a gypsy returning an empty bottle of cider because it was wet.
>>38777 I assume the gypsies don't know the security guard is only there when they are. As far as they're concerned, he could be outside Co-Op all the time.
Police van at Co-Op. Copper inside talking to staff, security guard is manually opening and closing the sliding door, one in one out. These travelling folks sound cheeky.
