Longrider

Normally, I agree wholeheartedly with Leg Iron. However, I can’t agree with this one.

Now we have a smoker who defended himself against a shrill harpy, and who then helped her to safety, jailed for four years. If he had left her there until the next train cut her into sushi he would have had a lesser sentence. As long as he wasn’t smoking while it happened. Lucky for him the EU vanishing act has not yet come into force.

The general thrust of the piece; the tactics used by the Righteous being the same as those of the Inquisition is sound and well observed and I agree with the point being made. However, the use of this incident mars the argument.

A carpenter pushed a woman off a station platform and on to a rail track after a row about him smoking, a court has heard.

Ionel Rapisca, 33, is accused of pushing Linda Buchanan, 59, at Kent’s Farningham Road station in August 2008.

The management consultant landed near a live line carrying 750 volts, Maidstone Crown Court was told.

Mr Rapisca, of Joyce Green Lane, Dartford, denies grievous bodily harm with intent.

It doesn’t matter whether he intended to cause injury or not, it doesn’t matter what the argument was about – he caused actual bodily harm to Buchanan and but for a few inches narrowly avoided causing her death – and that he subsequently helped her back onto the platform is neither here nor there, either; she could have been killed by the live rail or cut to pieces by an oncoming train and that ain’t pretty. I’ve picked up a few dead bodies from the line in my time, so can confirm this one from personal experience. Not meaning to cause harm simply isn’t a defence here. He did push her, this is undeniable fact. Had she died, he would have been facing – correctly – manslaughter charges. That he is a smoker and she an anti-smoking nag makes no difference to the facts of the case.

For those not accustomed to the electrification system on our railways, the third rail system is extremely dangerous and falling on it causes that 750 volts (and several thousand amperes) to earth through your body. Those of us who have cause to walk about this stuff do so with understandable caution. DC systems, should they earth through your body, cause it to cling to the power source making death pretty much certain – and if you don’t die, you will probably spend the rest of your life wishing that you had.

English law is and always has been clear; we owe a duty of care to our neighbours not to cause them harm. This applies to civil and criminal law. Should Buchanan wish to sue under tort law, she would have a cast iron case now that the criminal law has taken its course.

Mr Rapisca pushed Linda Buchanan and she subsequently fell onto the railway lines. He is at the very least guilty of a tort and having caused actual bodily harm, guilty of a criminal offence. He is lucky he wasn’t facing manslaughter charges. Whether he meant to is irrelevant – he broke the law.

Leg Iron’s assertion that Buchanan was a nagging harpy may well be so and such people are an annoyance. However, being an annoying harpy ain’t justification for pushing them onto the railway lines. Rapisca wasn’t gaoled because he was a smoker, he was gaoled because he caused actual bodily harm. There’s nothing new in this and it has nothing to do with smoking. So, as an illustration to make Leg Iron’s otherwise excellent case, this one falls short.

Via Prodicus, this little gem from Rod Liddle:

By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap. You will all have had your epiphanies long before me, I suspect, reading the smug drivel of la Toynbee and Gary Younge and Monbiot, or its pathetic attempts via The Guide to be down with the kids on the street (perhaps the worst written, most cringe-inducing, supplement in Fleet Street).

I have never bought a newspaper during my adulthood (that I can remember – so if I have, the occasion was so rare, I’ve forgotten it and the reason why). There is a sound reason for this; they are invariably written by ill-informed scumbags with no respect for fact and truth. People so lazy they cannot be bothered to check their facts before committing to print. Time and again, I have noted factual errors when areas of my expertise are subject to their stories. So, I can only presume that this ignorance, laziness and failure is standard practice.

When I was a child, my parents took the Sun. They switched to the Express when it changed hands and became the rag it is today. Not that the Express was much better, frankly. I recall prior to the 1979 election objecting to an editorial instructing me how to vote. I made a decision that day never to give these bastards any of my money. It is not up to a newspaper editor to tell me how to cast my vote. Subsequently, I became aware of the sheer magnitude of factual illiteracy in the reporting when I became involved with issues that made the news. Newspapers aren’t the only ones, of course, the Television news is just as bad.

I can almost forgive the rag-tops as they make no pretence about reason or truth – they sensationalise and do it openly; so browsing The Sun, Mirror, Star, Express, Mail or Sport, you know up front that you will not be getting a rational, objective presentation of the facts. The broad-sheets are supposed to be different, but they aren’t, they merely dress it up in pseudo intellectualism and none more sickeningly so than The Guardian.

The Guardian; supposedly a liberal paper, presents some of the most vile, illiberal opinions from its line up of bigots, eco-warriors, race hate mongers, professional victims and fascists. For example, if a man wrote a misogynistic article in the vein of Julie Bindel’s bigoted outpourings, it wouldn’t get past the editor – and if it did, there would be howls of outrage from the offended usual suspects. Likewise if a white man wrote an inverse Joseph Harker piece. Yet they publish blatant misandry from their resident feminists and blatantly racist identity politics from the likes of Harker, just as they publish calls for more state interference in our lives, just as, despite the virtual collapse of the AGW scam, they still peddle it. Oh, sure, they may have decided in the circumstances, to stop calling people deniers, but make no mistake, they are still firmly hitched to this bandwagon and the authoritarianism that goes with it.

My opinion of newspapers and the journalists who write for them is almost as low as my opinion of the politicians that they suck up to and enable; but I reserve my greatest contempt for the Guardian for the very reasons Liddle mentions in the quote above, so his words resonate well, I think.