Tough on the causes of crime by Susan Grimsdell
What makes a youth offender? I can never understand how people can vote for someone who doesn’t ever spell out the detail of what he (in this case) is going to do. Tama Potaka has just won the by-election in Hamilton West and all I’ve heard so far is that he is going to be “tough” on crime. What specifically does that mean? Shariah law perhaps? Nobody wants to be the victim of crime. But surely to reduce crime, we have to first understand what causes it? My son, and probably your… Read More
Free speech and hate speech by Susan Grimsdell
Absence of respect It’s interesting that those who clamour for the right to say anything they want are almost always people who want to say cruel hateful things about other people. They demand the “freedom” to spew out whatever racist, sexist, anti-semitic, anti-gay messages they want, whether in person or on social media. I’ve never heard anyone shout out for the right to express kind, generous, tolerant, respectful messages. We should remember how damaging hate speech is, and if anyone doesn’t know how to identify hate speech, the simple test is –… Read More
A helping hand for the rich by Susan Grimsdell
We all pay taxes and I’m only too happy to do so. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Tax is the rent we pay to live in a civilised society”. Our accumulated money pays for schools, health care, and thousands of other amenities, as well as providing us with money when we are unemployed, sick or old. Share the pot fairly My taxes go into a huge pile of money we call “government” money. Of course we know it’s actually ours, that we’ve handed it over in order to meet the needs of… Read More
Losing the art of reading by Susan Grimsdell
Recent statistics indicate that reading books is a fast-disappearing pastime. It seems that some young people leaving school can barely read at all, let alone read great works of literature. Access to the classics They have trouble grasping the meaning of words and sentences, so to think of them picking a book like Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” or Dickens’ “Great Expectations” off the shelf is laughable. It just doesn’t happen. I remember not long ago a young person won the prize for a critical essay on Harper Lee’s “To Kill a “Mockingbird” and… Read More
Passed away by Susan Grimsdell
Death is the word It’s been a difficult week for me. What I mourn is not the death of the queen, but the passing away of the word death. The passing away of placing value on truth and reality, and the replacement of those vital golden values with the dross and fakery of euphemism. I didn’t hear one single person use the word “died”. Nor did I hear one single person explain where she has passed away TO. Considering that a very small percentage of people in the UK and certainly in… Read More
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