Metaphors are Easy - the Truth is Hard

I’m planning on committing a hate crime. D’oh, what am I saying? I am thinking, therefore I am automatically committing a hate crime. It is only a matter of time before the pre-crime units throughout the land will be equipped with the necessary pre-cogs and intuits to read my mind. D’oh again, my mind is already being read as I type; as you read. You know what I’m going to think even before I think it myself. Bastards! (But you knew that, didn’t you?)

The trouble with facts is that that there are too damned many of them. Bloody facts, coming over here, raping our beliefs, taking advantage of our tolerance. Millions of facts are flooding into Europe; you can’t move for them. Sometimes I wonder if there is any space left for the truth, as the truth gets pushed out of our public lives and facts appear on our screens as if if fact lives are the only lives which matter.

Respected historian, David Starkey, paid a price for dabbling with the politics of facts and Darren Grimes in his turn is being made to suffer. There is no justice for truth these days, but threaten a fact and the Old Bill will turn up in a dawn raid to take your liberty in a heartbeat. The truth of the matter doesn’t, er, matter, when facts turn up en masse, demanding attention in far greater proportion to their numbers.

A very recent study even demonstrated that facts are over-represented in all visual broadcast media. What room is there, these days, for the truth, for all our truths… for our truths’ truths? I fear for the future of the young truths of today; they even want to be fact, as if somehow a raw fact has the same value as the honest truth. Truth is the bedrock of a civil society, whereas facts have a habit of multiplying without reason and imagining they have the same value without putting in the hard miles.

Yesterday, in response to a tweet about yet more rapefugee asylum seekers being represented by what are referred to by government voices as ‘lefty lawyers’ the Dorset Eye (me neither) challenged me to produce evidence to back up my re-assertion that they are, indeed, lefty lawyers. That is the truth of the matter; they are defending left wing ideals in regard to these invaders. But lawyers don’t deal in the truth, do they? They deal in facts. And facts, like statistics, if tortured long enough, will tell you whatever to wish to hear.

Where this leads...

The rule of law is devalued when it deals in facts and ignores the truth. The fact of the matter may be a rash word, issued under duress. Gather enough of these inconvenient facts and the truth of a good life lived in tolerant harmony with others is buried and forgotten. Only the fabricated facts of the ‘hate’ remains. This is important because the truth is being denied on a daily basis. I’m not just defending David Starkey here; I’m speaking out for all of us.

A bunch of arse!

The law is an ass. And it is an ass of its own making. It is an illustration of the adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The law is no longer (if it ever was) an impartial leveller, all men being equal before it. Its judgements are not made by dispassionately neutral disciples of truth but by partisan actors, confident that they themselves are above or at least beyond reproach.

If the rule of law is supposed to be sacred; if the rule of law is said to be a sign of civilisation; if the rule of law is held to be the principal characteristic of a peaceful and prosperous society; why is it so wrong, so often and so obviously antipathetic to the concerns of the millions expected to abide by it? The legal establishment in the west now seems so corrupted by political motives that the pure barbarism of sharia almost looks appealing.

The law exists to keep normally honest people on the straight and narrow – by definition habitual criminals pay it no heed – the threat of penalty is deterrent enough in most cases. And properly applied, the consequences of conviction ought to result in rehabilitation back to acceptable behaviour. But when the law seems to come down more heavily on the habitually compliant and deliver the softest of non-justice on the career criminal, it is little wonder that faith in it is at a low ebb.

The church lost its moral right to lead when it harboured paedophile priests, embezzled money, interfered in politics and embarked on occasional sanctimonious ramblings in the Guardian. The law lost all respect when it championed the rights of the amoral, the misfits and the actually illegal above those of the average citizen. Human Rights has become a laughable attempt to rigorously defend deviants and stamp on the throats of those who speak out for normality. There is a test in law of the ‘reasonable person’, but what of the ‘normal person’?

Normality is easy to establish, it is a mathematical probability of occurrence. And under this probability, most people see that the law has become a joke. When you are likely to go to jail for being a disgusting idiot burning an effigy of a building than to be tackled for knife crime, then the law is rightly derided. And I do understand that there is a great difference between the application of jurisprudence and the reality of policing, but they are as intertwined as are eating and defecating; I’ll leave you to decide which is which in this simile.

Pleas to common sense fall on deaf ears and the uneven hand of justice continues to be reported daily. Violent criminals released to re-offend, pensioners arrested over words, burglars defended against their intended victims, illegal immigrants given leave to remain and the drip-drip-drip of social media thought-policing. To the reasonable person this all looks insane.

It surely can’t continue – week after week brings new confected ‘hate’ offences while old and genuine malice appears increasingly untouchable. There has to come a time, I believe, when the only way to reset our systems will be to take up arms against our own government – what a tragedy that in the very seat of justice and fairness, the only justice for the British people who once trusted the law may necessarily lie in taking the law into their own hands.