Crime and Punishment- Moving on From Barbarism

Well, it seems the Empire's greatest victory, was in your hearts and minds.
14 votes to 4, the 'Empah' was a Good Thing.
Bearing in mind, that some of those voting were probably not Brits, I guess that makes me proud to be British.

Not a Jingoistic, flag waving way, but merely able, as a person living in Britain, to feel validated in my recognition of all those little things I do like about the culture I live in, and which I can see you don't get elsewhere.

I think the British Empire comes from the same roots as pub culture. Brits love to chat and ruminate. We ponder the weather, we moan about the government. We don't get carried way by love or flag waving. Football, maybe.
And even University professors like to go the pub and ruminate with eachother, have a chat, discuss DNA structure, etc.

We're a bar culture. But a very chatty, non-plussed, sensible one.
So good ideas spread fast here.
Silly ones get laughed down.
It helps we live cheek by jowl here- we're all too close to eachother for anyone to get really left out, for society to become too divided. Whatever the xenophobes fear, immigrants to the UK go native very quickly.
We take new ideas, new groups, a bit of something better, we take things in then and add it the whole. That's us. We change our society and our culture and we like doing it. We have no problem with Curry replacing Fish and Chips as the national dish.

We're the most practical culture on the planet.

I think that's always been our secret.
So hey, I'm glad to live in that culture. It is special, and I'm proud of that, if not the whole 'God Save the Queen' thing.
And it did good too.

Anyway, on to tonights topic.
Criminals. And what to do about them.

Quite obviously, because the crime figures keep going up, Prison isn't exactly the most effective cure.
Yet the only solution our wise rulers come up with is 'Build More Prisons'.
Have you seen that film where Manhattan Island is one big prison?

How is a system which turns most of those it processes into habitual criminals or emotional wrecks, a solution to the social problems of a supposedly intelligent species?

Think about it. We all nod when an UNjustly convicted man talks of his traumatic ordeal. We know it must be a traumatic ordeal. Prisoner of war camps were. This obviously must be too. To the JUSTLY convicted as well.

It's Eye for an Eye. It is the same logic that approves capital punishment and mutilation as appropriate in this era.
It belongs in the playground.
'He hit me first.'

Two wrongs don't make a right.

So what can we do?

Here's my idea. Take away punishment, and the role of justice is clear.
1. Remove a danger, if there is one.
2. Prevent a reoccurence, if you can.
3. If the guilty party knew exactly what they were doing, knew the risks, is no threat, just gambled for selfish reasons, make him repay his debt.

Rehabilition. Recompense. Public Protection.



There are three reasons that people infringe society's laws.

First, those who took a short term fix to deal with something that can be fixed.
Poverty, Unemployment, Drug Addiction, Poor Judgement, can all be dealt with by compulsory treatment.
This is supposed to happen in Prison, but the money that could be spent on making it effective, is largely blown by the cost of locking them up.
Puting them up in a securely gaurded hotel, effecting a compulsory remedial treatment, whilst paying their bills during their absence, would be far cheaper, and far more effective.

So we can take these out of prison.

Second, those who knew exactly what they were doing (not made a mistake)and have no character flaws, except they take risks. Most of these are actually quite bright. Fraudsters, Drug dealers, Reckless drivers, Most Murderers.

Make them pay. But in a useful way. Locked behind bars doesn't serve anybody.
Why have upper limits on community service?
10 years weekends on toilet cleaning duties?
Or Life?

Far more productive.

So we can take these out of prison.
They get the point of consequences.

So that leaves with the real nasties.
The ones we just don't want around.
Can't cure them. Lock up them up for ten years, they will come out and cause more evil. That's who they are.

So why ever let them out?

But why be inhumane?



Make their prisons as secure as Fort Knox, but like Butlins inside.
Keep them away from the rest of us, but don't hurt them

It must be hell to be in their heads anyway.

So that's my view.
Let's get rid of these Victorian Houses of Human Misery.

Have your say!

Infinity and The Singularity- Limits to Our Conceptualisation?

Regular readers will know that I have a theory on how the universe works in physical terms, parts of which have been the subject of posts here.

I'm not going to beat about the bush- parts of this post will get quite abstract, parts very theoretical, and parts will seem quite wild in the assertions I put forward.
However, I hope those of you who follow what I am saying see the logic of the proposition and all it's bizarre implications.

The problem relates to flaws in our understanding of the universe itself.

A while back, I came to the conclusion that the expansion of the universe could be explained in simple terms; it is the first and simplest way to acheive the ultimate aim of the universe, it's own demise.
By expanding, it creates space, it stretches out the gaps between the crest of waves, ultimately reducing all energy to zero point. Red Shift is the primordial dynamic of the universe in action- thinning out the energy.

In other words, at the start, the space is Zero, at the end the energy is Zero.

But here comes the problem. At the start, all the energy proceeds from the same place.
The same mathematical point- a singularity, a point in spacetime where all the laws of physics (except those of thermodynamics) break down.
Or do they?

You see, conventional physics has no option but to ascribe the wave function at this singularity an infinite value.
By implication, therefore, heat death can never come, it would take infinite time to reach heat death.

This cannot be true.

Here is the crux of the problem- in a finite universe, no real calculation can ever yield the result 'infinity'.

The problem is deeper than we realise.
Firstly, it cannot be true that the laws of physics 'break down' at a singularity.
It cannot be true that the universe will go on forever.

It is our laws of mathematics which have not accounted for a necessary limitation, which makes them incapable of explaining a number that has not been acknowledged.

Because mathematics tells us that there is only one number you can divide one by and reach zero.
That number is infinity.
Problem. Big Problem.

Because the universe shows us that there must be a REAL quantity, a REAL number, which IS the last of all numbers, beyond which, in our universe there ARE no more numbers.
Otherwise the laws of physics could not work. There are only a finite amount of quantities. One day, SOMETHING (The Universe) will be NOTHING.

Therefore, there is a real number which when one is divided by it, WILL yield zero as the answer.
The opposite of Nothing is not Infinity, it is Everything.
The Everything number.
It is so far beyond our conception, that for us, in our lives, it might as well be infinity, but it isn't.

In the same way, we know that in practical geometry two parallel lines never meet, but in the universe as a whole they not only can, they must.



We need to understand what mathematics is.
Its roots are purely empirical- we know from practical experience that 2+2=4
In fact the only numbers we can really visualise are the lower end of the scale, the rest we conceptualise by the concept of bases- 84 is 8x10+4.
84 is a real number. Such a quanitity can exist.
Not all numbers can.

Negative numbers, for example, are an accounting tool.
They exist on balance sheets, but if calculations involving real quantities yield them as answers, the answer is wrong.
There are never going to be -12 cans of beer in your fridge.

Pi is a ratio. It's not a real number, because it doesn't make sense. It is our way of expressing numerically a relationship- that between diameter and circumference, that can never be expressed in real terms, you couldn't make a genuinely perfect circle using real matter. The numbers just don't pan out.
The fact is we are trying to impose a human idea of a geometrical truth, when it doesn't entirely work.
The same is true of the square route of two.
We are just expecting too much to get a sensible answer.

The fact we try, and the fact we give expression to our attempt in a way we can link to the rest of the conceptual system we have designed for dealing with quantities, is a sign of our amazing ability to conceptualise.

But we shouldn't lose sight of empirical reality.

Infinity is an imaginary number. Imaginary numbers are numbers mathematicians use to explain concepts that defy expression.
For example, the square root of -9.
3 squared=9
-3 squared=9

So what therefore is the square root of -9?
Here come imaginary numbers.
Mostly, imaginary numbers serve simply to allow advanced mathematicians to explore the limits of our conceptualisation.
In no case can a REAL calculation, yield an answer that is an imaginary number.
Except when we come to look at our scale of numbers. Because our scale of numbers starts with real numbers, and ends in imaginary ones.
We know, deep down, this cannot be a true expresion of reality, it bothers us.
It has driven mathematicians mad.

Because up there in the higher reaches of quantities, is the ultimate quanitity.
When you multiply the total amount of variables existent in our universe, there will be a quantity beyond which no real calculation in the real universe will ever go.



The Omega number.
Now yes, this has scary consequences. Infinity squared= Infinity. We are comfortable with that.
But to accept that there exists a REAL quantity, which when multiplied by itself, yield itself, exactly like a mirror image of Zero, only it is EVERYTHING, is mindblowing.

Because long before we reach that number, the ways quantities compute, must behave differently to what we assume.
Because the number twenty places below Everything, when multiplied by itself, can't yield a result higher than Everything.

At some point, everything we assume about multiplying and dividing, must follow different rules, ones we don't know yet, because we don't know where the rules change- I can't begin to conceive the point where the rules would change, but it must be beyond a centillion, on purely conceptual grounds.



But thus must be so. For mathematics is the study of quantitive relationships in the real universe, a finite universe, with a finite number of possibilities. One day, all those possibilities will have been exhausted.

Ultimately, when we look at the equation 2+2=4, we need to remember the proviso;
In this universe.

Sixth and Seventh Sense- Our Evolving Psyche?

I'm resuming normal service here with a foray into the murky realms of what is classed as the paranormal.
I really don't like the term, any more than I like the term supernatural.
I think the universe works by cast iron laws- everything that happens is the result of normal, natural phenomena, or it doesn't happen at all.

That's my position, because I think ultimately everything is logical, and every thing is reducible.

So I'm going to attempt to explain how I think the possible workings of so called Psychic powers are driven.

Because, whilst there is a whole pseudoscience built on the premise of a sixth sense, there is also a genuine logic behind the concept.

Or, looking at it deeper, two separate senses- a sixth AND a seventh sense.

The first of these, the sixth sense if you like, is actually just a product of our own minds.
We forget how good a processor of information our brain is. We forget it works essentially by following patterns.

For example, your brain knows that when your alarm goes off, pevious experience of alarms going off, tells it that it is time to get out of bed.
Your brain knows that when it hears your name, then communication is being aimed at you.
Nothing hard about these, not difficult things to learn, even an animal can.
But our brains process a lot more information than any animal.

For example, if we saw a figure wondering towards in a sheet, our knowledge of the human form would easily tell us a person, not a camel, was underneath the sheet. The outline would tell us so.
So it is with more than we realise. Our brains pick up and process far more information than we realise.
After decades of experience in life, we tell so much more about people, the second the interaction starts, than we know we realise. This is intuition. On the basis of what we know about previous occasions we have processed similar information, X has been so of a person.

It's not hard for a Catholic, for example, to pick up that someone they have just met is probably a fellow Catholic, because their thought processes follow the same lines as everyone else you know who grew up being told the Virgin Mary was the embodiment of womanhood, that people should be forgiven, that sins needed to be confessed and that sex is a bit dirty.

It's just.... there.

They may not hold those views, but their thought processes were heavily shaped by those concepts.
It's why we know when the information we receive may be the truth, but not the whole truth. We can see where there appear to be gaps. The conversation just doesn't quite run in a stream, because bits are being jumped over.

Our brain is showing us the LIKELY reasons for the things we haven't been told or haven't been shown.

It fills in the blanks for us.
Which is why so often, we know all along.
Often of course, we didn't- our brain has taken two plus two and reached five. The missing bits turned out to be completely different to what our thought processes deduced.

Of course, we tend to forget these bits, and just remember all the occasions when we ascribe our correct judgement to something mystical, rather than being amazed and impressed by just how amazing that grey matter between yours ears really is.

For example, I wouldn't mind betting that fifty percent of the assumptions I make of bloggers on my blogroll are right. The other fifty couldn't be more wrong.

So sixth sense- the projection by your brain of the likely nature of the information it needs to form a judgement, or make a decision, but doesn't happen to possess.



Now we move to the more interesting one- the hypothetical seventh sense.
And yes, I think this might well be real as well.

I have stated before that in my opinion, the universe is conscious and intelligent by any meaningful use of those terms.
I think that the universe consistently transmits information.

Furthermore, I think we should expect that humanity is continuously evolving. I think it's logical to assume that whilst we are morphologically identical in most respect to Cro-Magnon man, there ARE actual organic differences in our brains, in our sensual capacities.

Firstly, because logically, human society MUST have speeded up certain evolutionary dynamics.
The fact is, ability to communicate, to receive and transmit information, is the most valuable of all human skills, and human society will consistently have rewarded the fittest in these respects.

I contend that in terms of what is classed as IQ, there probably was a qualitative difference between Cro-Magnon man and the Man on the Street today.
Over the last ten thousand years, those who were able to master literacy and vocabulary earliest, those who were able to process the more complex forms of sound communication (language) and symbolic representation (literacy), did best out of human society, and contributed far more to the wider gene pool than those who didn't.

We are able to conceptualise in a way Cro-Magnon couldn't because we all carry the genes of those who then were prodigies.
It will always be thus- better communicators, those who master the art of human interaction best, will breed most.
That's sexual selection, which is what drives evolution.

The charming rake passes his genes on, because he is good at understanding human interaction and good at showing the ladies he knows how to communicate with them.
And the ladies aren't being foolish in falling for his charms- they really are selecting a good choose of mate- one who passes on good interaction genes, genes that twig how we work.

So it stands to reason, if there was any tiny way that any one's brain had an extra-sensory capacity for picking up vibrations transmitted by the universe itself, that allowed a person to receive thoughts direct from others- thoughts transmitted by Electro-Magnetic impluse across the airwaves direct to theirs, evolution would favour the survival of such a trait.



It's not impossible to see how such a transmitter/receiver could exist in the complex nervous systems of our brain.
It's not hard to see why this would be so benefical, that had it emerged just once in human history, it would have spread through the gene pool like a forest fire.
The dynamics in favour of such a possibility are strong.

So strong in fact, that we might almost expect it to evolve. If it hasn't evolved yet, then seeing that it almost certainly COULD, and that it would be so favoured, that at some point it MUST evolve.

The only question is, has it already?

My opinion?
I think so.
I think sometimes, I do receive thoughts direct from people.
I think sometimes I transmit them as well.

And I think all of you do too.
Isn't that amazing?

This Really Is The Way

This is all I really weant to say tonight.
You don't have to be religous to get it.
It's what life is about. Life just is better if people try to live this way.
It will be better for all of us when we all do.
What's wrong with starting today?

This is what the greatest guy of them all has to say;

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

Hedonism and Ethics

In a sense, this is a personal post.
It is a post about the system of values I actually attempt to live my life by.
Attempt being the operative word.

Firstly, I don't know many people who remotely live up to the system of values they espouse, but I at least try to live up to mine.

Secondly of course, whilst most of those close to me subscribe to a greater or lesser degree to my values, society at large doesn't. Since I live in society at large, I have to make some accomodation with it.

Hedonism is often seen as a dirty word. Basically, it means living for pleasure.
If you just lived for your own pleasure and screwed everybody else, indeed it would be.
But Hedonism needn't be that way.

My philosophy is simple.
Clasic Liberals would hold that 'Each man knows best the route to his own happiness.'
It has often been pointed out, there are major problems with that. These routes could well be mutually conflicting, and some people's routes are decidely harmful to everyone else.
So we need to add a condition;
'Each man must be aware of the route to another's pain.'

We all know what makes us happy, and we know what hurts others.
If we can find a life that makes us as happy as life can and hurts others around as us little as possible, then by my view we are living the best life any ethical system of values can demand of us.

I think the first point of true Hedonism- rather than the dirty stereotype- is that it should be genuinely rewarding.
Self-centred is never genuinely rewarding.
The fact remains that the most enjoyable of all pleasures, is interconnection with people.
I had a great weekend last weekend, but the best bit of all was the eight hour long discussion held from 2AM to 10AM Saturday morning between myself and three of my closest most intelligent friends, which covered Capitalist exploitation, the Military, God, the power of Music and its history, evolution, free love, football, Blair's legacy, how much financiers really knew and how much is just educated gambling, this stuff is GREAT.

It is, in itself a reason to be alive.
To compare thoughts on the experience we all share and exchange viewpoints.
That's why I love my mates. They're great.

So to me, personal interconnection of any kind is a truly beautiful thing.
I love the human mind, it's the closest thing there is to Pure God.

But there is more to it than that, for me.

The fact is, owning a six bedroomed home with a flash car and a wife and two kids is not up there in my life plans.
It really doesn't interest me. I have a home, which someone else owns, it's just not the building society.

I could live the way I do till the day I die, as long I had people around me.
I need love and affection, just as everyone else does.
Not everybody might agree with the way I acheive this, but as long as it concerns two consenting adults and no one gets hurt, I don't feel any shame in it.



More importantly, I don't feel the need to aspire to something different.

What I choose to do in my social life, again should be up to me, as long as no one gets hurt.
If I choose, once a month or so to use stimulants at social occasions, surely that's up to me?
I've paid my taxes, paid my bills, surely it's up to me to decide what to do with the rest?

I like my life this way, this is the route to my happiness, and at my age, I think I know what makes me happy.

As long, of course, as I consider the consequences.
That is what ethics is really about.

Making sure we can live together in the best possible way.

Well, here's the way I see it.



Should I be standing at the Pearly Gates one day, in front of our Father and he reads out his long list of charges, here is my answer;

'I lived my life to try to get as much pleasure as I could and give as little pain as I could to others. Where I could, I tried to give pleasure to others, and where I could I tried to minimise their pain.
I am responsible for my decisions, but YOU decided what would make us feel pleasure and what would make us feel pain. YOU made us. If I made bad judgements, I did so on the basis of the feelings YOU gave me.'

I really think sometimes God hides the real answers in religion. Moral codes are the products of their times, designed to keep together the societies they serve.

But really it's just about getting as much as you can out of the life he gave you and spreading as much love as you can.

I think.
Hey, I might be wrong.
But this is the only life I'm ever going to lead here, and I'm not wasting it while I have it.

Live each day as if it is your last.

The Legacy of Empire

A very interesting result from last week's poll- bearing in mind most of those who voted, were presumably bloggers themselves.

The overwhelming majority of you think this medium is completely pointless.



I'm actually going to go out on a limb here and say I completely disagree.
Communication is the most important thing we do.

It is what life is all about.
As Electro-Kevin says, the purpose of life is to pass on DNA.
DNA is a method of passing on coded information.
Life itself, survives better and evolves faster, by it's ability to receive and transmit information.

The stars communicate their presence to us.

Human existence and human progress are all about communication.
Most of the problems of the world, can be blamed on poor communication between people.
The greatest advances in human history have been those which found better ways to store and disseminate information.

This is what makes us different. We know so much, we DO so much, because we are able to pool all the good ideas any human ever had and build on them. Our knowledge and our thoughts are the product of those of the many many great thinkers who walked this road before us.
We start our lives further along it than they did.

This is a medium which democratises the spread of ideas and information. It allows YOU the ability to disseminate YOUR thoughts.

Great men alone don't change the world, millions of little people can too, simply by talking.
Have faith in what you are doing and the role you play in people's lives.
I don't think this IS pointless.

Or it needn't be.

Tonight's post (and poll) is in some ways a continuation of last nights.
Crashie actually seems to have had a foreboding of it, because her comment on the last post, is related to this one.

One thing we really don't like to talk about in the UK is the Empire. We acknowledge it existed, but we don't like to debate it, or understand how it happened- or what it really left behind.
I think we need to.

Because unless we understand it, we can never really understand the world we live in.
And I really do mean, the WHOLE world.

We are too busy either exagarating our decline, or feeling guilty about the less pleasant bits to be completely objective.
Our ancestors weren't objective either, but their subjectivty at least acheived something.
Whether in the final judgement, they acheived something truly amazing, or simply exploitative, is open to debate.



To find the roots of Empire, we need to go back to the seventeenth century.
The seventeenth century was a hard time across Europe.
It was a battle betwen superstition and reason, betwen Protestant and Catholic, Kings and People.

And in a small island on the edge of Europe, the people made the final choice. They had learned something from their century of struggle.
They had learned from the experience of being ruled by Cromwell.
The basic lessons they learned were simple.

1. Never hero worship your leaders.
2. Retain the right to sack your government.
3. Permit all views to be freely aired. The more people discuss, the sooner truth is reached. Suppressing ideas, leads them to go underground. Truth will out, as they say.
4. Allow people as much freedom as you possibly can- that way you give free rein to their creativity, and the people themselves make their country great.

It took most of the rest of Europe a pretty long time to come to these conclusions- in some ways, being honest, I'm not sure they really are QUITE ingrained in continental culture yet.
Throughout the twenties and thirties, many European peoples were easily duped into the idea that their problems could be solved by scrapping democratic systems and raising up leaders who could not be sacked and demanded hero worship.

Hitler is the most obvious example- every voter who voted for him knew that he wasn't a big believer in democratic decisions- but their fredom from absolutism was young, and they didn't yet believe in it.

The French almost got the idea in 1789- before they clamoured to make Napoleon a new God-Emperor of Reason.
And their hero-worship of De Gaulle was a little alarming- it is hard to see him as a real democratic ruler.

In Europe, freedom is granted from above, in the Anglosphere, power is granted by the people.

The Eighteenth century was the century when the peoples of the British Isles felt the benefits of their new system- completely different then to the way any other people in Europe thought.
Freed from oppressive government, the people flourished, created, invented, travelled- and rose quickly from a second rate power, to the first of the Superpowers.



And they carried their message with them.
To be sure, the traders who sent their ships- and their mercenaries- took with them the profit motive.
But they also took with them a pretty amazing set of values, by the standards of the time.
They didn't just come to pillage, as other empires had done, doing for the conquered territories the bare minimum to provide expedient rule.

The came to develop the lands they conquered. They knew they were able to acheive so much, because their system and their values were the best in the world (at the time). They were right to have faith in that.
They were imposing it, and imposing it by force, but a part of them surely felt, that if the British way of life had done such wonders for them, they were good values to proselytise.

The British invested in their territories in an extraordinary way, they allowed free settlement in an extraordinary way.

The only empire that truly compares to it in impact, is that of Rome.

The Romans left roads, aqueducts, laws, etc.
They left behind countries far more advanced than they found them. Whatever we may think of the worst of their rulers, their decadent ways, their culture of slavery, they changed the world for the better.

Likewise, the British Empire left behind a complex infrastructure and a system of values it not only left to the peoples it subjected, but values which have gradually won over the world.



Whatever was done along the way, the true legacy of the Empire, it's bequest to the world really was a better way of doing things.

And its legacy lives yet.

The Second World War was a real struggle of ideas- a struggle between tyranny and freedom.
But ultimately it was the battle where the Empire and it's children- most notably the United States- put their money where their mouth was.

It is no coincidence that Westminster democracy is still considered the paradigm, and British Justice, for all faults, still in principle the model that is held up to the world.
The realities may be tarnished, the principles are good.

The world sees that, and it is a powerful dynamic in the world today.

For the world's policeman, is the Empire's child. It is trusted by many across the globe because it is the most powerful champion of those amazing values that any thinking person can se, must never be allowed to die.

And the Special Relationship, or Transatlantic Alliance?
It is fundamentally important to the US.
Not just because of what the UK is today, but because of what we were.

Every value the US holds dear, every value it trumpets, reached it's shores from the mother country.
When it acts in the name of those values, without the support of it's aged parent, those values seem hollow.
The world is not convinced.

But when the two act together, history is invoked.
The champions of the free world, the peoples who invented freedom, fought two world wars for it, and defended the free world against the Soviet Union.

It's a powerful legend, and like so many legends, has more than a grain of truth in it.
There is a tendancy for the world to trust the Star and Stripes and the Union Jack flying side by side.



The British Empire carved a world largely in its own image, globalisation has been more anglicisation than we care to admit.

In my opinion, future generations will be fascinated by it.

It simply remains for me to quote the words on the statue of Boudicca on the Thames embankment;
'Regions Caesar never knew, Thy posterity shall sway.'

Maybe it wasn't all bad.

Have your say!

Britain's Hired Killers

This post has partly been inspired by a discussion that took place over the weekend regarding someone who was a part of our group many years ago, but has now burned his bridges with many people.

Fact is, he's changed. And not in a nice way.
He has lost all ability to use people skills.
He is now a compulsive reactor- in a violent way.

The oddity is, he is one of the few people I know who is EXACTLY where they planned to be in this stage of their lives.
He is a Major in the Royal Marines.

I liked the guy I knew many years ago. Nowadays I would respectfully decline an offer to go for a drink with him.
Not because I dislike him, but because he is no a longer a person I could feel comfortable with.
The fact is, I've never killed anybody. Nor has anybody I know. I don't know how many people this guy has killed in his life, but bearing in mind he served in Afghanistan and Iraq, I suspect it's quite a tally. He has an exemplory service record, which means he is very good at his job.
But let's not escape from the fact, that his job is as a career killer.
Soldier, Mercenary, Hitman- all paid to kill.

I understand that we need the services of such people, but just because it's done in our name doesn't mean I want to be around them.
I have never yet come across anyone who left the army capable of readapting to life outside.

That's understandable. When you have spent twenty years in the company of others who regarded killing people as part of a days work, it's got to change you.
It cuts you off from ordinary emotional understanding of the rest of humanity.

Sometimes, we are not particularly honest with ourselves about the British Armed Forces.
It's true that the British Army is very good at what armies are supposed to do- win battles, and ultimately, wars.
It's record of victory is almost unparallelled.
As an example of how a fighting machine should work, it's highly impressive.



Sometimes we in this country are blind to the fact that though the Empire has gone, this is still a very powerful country- the only European nation to be in both the top five Economic powers AND the top five Military powers.

Put bluntly, we have one of the highest shares of wealth in the world, and spend one of the highest figures on armamaments. It doesn't cost that high a percentage of GNP, because contrary to what we like to think, we have a lot of money to spend, period.

Most countries have armies to protect their borders, hardly ever used, unlikely to see real combat and ineffective against a serious attack.
Only a tiny handful of countries possess armies capable of invading countries in far off regions of the globe.

Ours is one of them.

British Troops are pretty much always involved in conflict situations somewhere.
Whereas the soldiers of many countries can serve a whole career without killing anyone, the majority of British soldiers will.

In one sense, while armies exist anywhere at all, I'm glad ours is still one of the best.
In the same way, while nuclear weapons exist, I'm glad we have one of the larger stashes in the world.

I think both are thoroughly dangerous to world security- and potentially to our species in the world we live in now.
World War Three will not last six years- possibly not much more than six hours.



But there is a social side too, one we ignore.
There are two countries in the Western world which stand out as markedly more violent cultures than all the rest.
The United States and the UK.

The UK doesn't have the gun crime problem the US has, but only because we try to disarm everybody here. This is a sad sign really- we can't trust anybody with guns, although our constitutional theorists all agreed that the people should have the right to bear arms if their government did.
If the forces of the state have all the guns, it is a threat to liberty.

But in our society that needs to be sacrificed because it is just too dangerous to allow too many weapons out there.
In spite of this, you have more chance of being shot here than anywhere else in Europe.

As regards fighting, people are much more quick to turn to blows here than in most countries, we have a murder rate, high robbery rate, high burglary rate, in fact we have a high rate of most violent crimes.



There is a reason for this, in my opinion.
British culture- like US culture- has to be ambivalent towards violence, to a degree other countries don't have to be.

We need to ensure that a certain proportion of our young, usually those with sad upbringings who yearn to go off and be a hero, will buy the dream of soldiering, will join the army to become trained killers.
Because don't forget, unlike soldiers in other armies who only need to learn about about defensive tactics, British troops need to learn a lot more. They are unlikely to ever need to defend their homeland from attack- most will go elsewhere to fight.

We need an army of people, who didn't join to defend their home, but actually really want the chance to go abroad and kill people for the Crown.
We glorify it.

We classify our films much more stringently than our fellow Europeans when it comes to Sex, but much more relaxedly when it comes to violence.

And the Army is a fairly aggressive recruiter. It is impossible to watch the TV for long without an Armed Forces recruitment advert popping up.
It goes into High Schools to promote the option of serving the Crown.

It allows boys of seventeen to enlist, even though the state doesn't trust them to buy a drink or vote.
It trusts them, however, to really think about what they are signing up for.

We see them as heroes, but most of them end up human tragedies, spat out with a pension and no real life skills to serve them in the community at large.
But they retain their conditioning and mentality- rabid wolves let loose.

Few leave the British Armed Forces unscathed.

That's the reality.

If we had any sense, the permanent members of the UN security council, four of whom also happen to be amongst the leading military powers would announce a definite commitment to Total Universal Disarmament, certainly removing Standing Armies and Nuclear Weapons.
I'm not saying it would be easy to acheive, it would take a long time, but we need to at least commit to it.

We cannot any longer retain War as an ultimate resort in International Relations.
It is too dangerous for all of us, and the cost to society is too high.

Postscript; Just noticed, this is the two hundredth post here!