Howard Jacobson – Twat.

Howard Jacobson starts a stupid article in the Indy with a premise phrased as a question:

Civil liberties or civil protection – which is the more important?

We could simply stop at that point, because the answer is so obvious; civil liberties. Without them, the other is meaningless.

Still, lets trudge through the oozing, putrescent sludge that is Jacobson’s reasoning, shall we? He starts with an imaginary (for imaginary read idiotic strawman) scenario whereby a terrorist argues his human rights rather than be searched under section 44.

And so is another precious civil liberty preserved against the creeping depredations of the state in general and Section 44 in particular. And not before time, the denizens of Bleeding Heart Yard tell us. The police have been abusing their powers. Last year alone 265,000 people were stopped. Doesn’t seem a lot to me, but then, I am reminded, I wasn’t one of them. One of them or not, I don’t know how you can tell how many’s a lot or a little. In the abstract, there can be no right or wrong number of searchees. Depends how great the danger, doesn’t it? Depends who’s out there.

Where to start with such cretinous assumptions? Okay, so Jacobson wants to play with figures, does he? How many of those 265,000 searches resulted in a bust? None. Nil. Nada. Zip. Fuck all. That’s how many. So a fat fucking lot of good they did, eh? Now, here’s a little figures game; how many people have died in the UK as a result of terrorist activity in the past decade? less than 100. So, less than 100 out of a population in excess of 60 million. So, to Jacobson’s question “Depends on how great the danger”, the answer is “miniscule” and the constant barrage of illiberal behaviour on the part of politicians and the police is not only overkill, it hands the terrorist – those few that there are – a propaganda coup that they should only be able to dream of; if this were, as it should be, a liberal democracy. All the while that there are morons like Alan Johnson believing his own propaganda, and there is a politicised police force choosing soft targets to hit their check-boxes and cretins like Howard Jacobson who thinks that “being safe” is achievable and the responsibility of parliament and the police, our liberties will continue to be eroded and terror wins another victory.

There is a point to be made about profiling and Jacobson makes it – i.e. the police choose random targets rather than profile because they will be accused of discrimination. In fact, they should be discriminating. They should be targeting their attention where they have reasonable cause to suspect – like, say, where a suspect’s father tells them about it…

The consensus, anyway, is that the police haven’t been executing Section 44, if that isn’t too tasteless a verb, as intelligently or humanely as they should have been. So serves them right. They had it coming. Well done, yet again, Strasbourg.

Jacobson’s sarcasm is misplaced. They weren’t using it intelligently and it does serve them right. The consensus is correct. The Strasbourg judgement was the right one.

But hang on. Where are we in all this? By “we” I mean the moderate and timorous who ask only that we get on and off the bus intact each day.

Oh, for fuck’s sake! If you are that fucking timorous (cowardly) then don’t travel by bus (and speak for your fucking self, fuckwit. I’m neither timorous nor cowardly). Stay at home and wrap yourself in cotton wool. Living involves risk. Every time we go anywhere there is risk. There is greater risk of a road traffic incident than there is from the bogeymen. There is far more risk of dying in the home than there is from the jihadists. Get a sense of proportion and get a grip. And, take a moment or two to reflect on Benjamin Franklin’s words on this. Protection from bad men is not a right.

If the police, no matter how clumsy, are our protection, how does it benefit us to have lawyers in another country hampering their operations? View it how you will, this victory for the civil libertarians is nothing short of an overwhelming defeat for the people whose liberties they claim to uphold.

This man is an absolute wanker. If the police are to protect us, then perhaps they should concentrate their attention on detecting crime and catching criminals rather than chasing ordinary people for non-crimes. Every stop and search under section 44 was a wasted opportunity to be dealing with actual crime. So, yes the judgement was a victory for civil liberties and it’s a crying shame that our own government had to be dragged before a foreign court over the matter. They should have known that the best approach to terrorism is effective intelligence combined with belligerence – stick two fingers up at the bastards and carry on as before.

Let’s say it and have done: civil liberties, in the context of our times and as currently interpreted by those who professionally espouse them, are pestilential. Quite literally damaging to life and health. A blight.

Bollocks. The only pestilence here is half-witted, historically ignorant pricks like Howard Jacobson who peddle this effluence.

When freedom becomes ideological it invariably ends up our jailer.

Only if we are talking about absolute freedom with no rule of law. Otherwise, the only jailers here are those who would curb our liberties in the name of safety – a safety that can never be achieved.

Ironically when you get towards the end of the article you realise that what Jacobson is railing against is the “we know our rights” society that has lost sight of personal responsibility. In that, he is going in the right direction. Unfortunately, he is blaming libertarianism when this has nothing whatsoever to do with libertarianism; it is the antithesis of libertarianism. The whole sorry mess is one great big strawman and Jacobson is an ill-informed jerk. Take this for instance:

If we lose our civil liberties, the lawyers tell us, we surrender precisely what the terrorists wish to take.

They are correct.

Drivel.

No. What you have written is drivel. The lawyers you quote are correct. Every liberty surrendered is another small victory for those who would undermine our way of life and justifies terror as a tactic.

The sum total of Taliban ideology is not an overweight policeman in the Strand going through our underwear. Al-Qa’ida, building up its weaponry in Yemen, isn’t dreaming of the day when Shami Chakrabarti is out of a job. It isn’t our civil liberties they are after, gentlemen of the jury, it’s our living souls.

Sigh… Such utter stupidity. Each of those things erodes what they hate and despise above all; our liberal democracy, our liberty – without liberty, we might as well not bother having souls.

I note that the few comments so far posted are giving Jacobson a well-deserved kicking. Jolly good, keep it up.