I hope we can all agree, at least, that Sheriff Joe Arpaio is the world’s worst man.

Even before reading the latter piece, he was the kind of guy (alongside suicide bombers, rapist priests, and occasionally Ian Paisley) who made me wish there were a hell – just so I could imagine his expression after he died and ended up there.

Concerning that piece… sheer fucking evil. Everyone who voted for the man deserves to die in the nastiest crime scene imaginable. Imagine ‘CSI: Too Horrible For TV’. Something like that.

"Ethical arguments of the form ‘We should torture [other people] if…’ will be rejected out of hand. Ethical arguments of the form ‘I should be tortured if …’ may be entertained. Or, maybe better, ‘My sister should be tortured if…’. That is all" – Unqualified Offerings appears eminently qualified.

The Budget is a bit, but not very, wank.

In a proper budget, rich pensioners would be soaked for every penny they’ve stolen from the younger generation via insane asset price rises, rather than rewarded. Meanwhile, the last thing the younger generation would be encouraged to do is buy houses. Petrol duty would be doubled, since car use causes clear and significant damage to the environment and to non-consenting third-parties’ health; booze and fag taxes would be halved, since said comestibles don’t.

However, as an exercise in window dressing and not-fucking-things-up-very-much, it’s reasonably adequate. One cheer, one boo, and one diffident stare.

If you don’t accept that the 100,000 number from the Lancet study on Iraq war causalties represents a probable lower bound (given its exclusion of Falluja, where we appear to have killed everyone) on the number of Iraqis who died in the 18 months following the war and otherwise wouldn’t have died in the 18 months following the war, and you do not have a PhD in a statistical discipline, then you are an ignorant bigot

Given this, the number of ignorant bigots out there is scary enough to make one lose the will to live. Until one remembers that (per Dan), probably over 100,000 Iraqis didn’t even get that option.

I’ve also lost the will for Christopher Hitchens to live, although that started to happen some time ago.

[*] See here for why. Respond with criticisms of Tim Lambert’s explanations only if you either have a PhD in a statistical discipline, or wish to provide my readers with cheap laughs at your ignorant bigotry.

When police forces are claiming they don’t have enough officers to investigate murder cases, does it really make sense to commit police time to locking up not-for-profit warezmongers?

There are two sane answers. One is "no, of course it doesn’t, what the fuck is going on? Who gives a monkey’s if a few nerds get the next version of Windows before it’s released". The other is "no, of course it doesn’t, but software piracy is a serious problem, so we should fund the coppers enough to deal with both". The latter is a reasonable view – but even so, based on current resources, there is no excuse for the police wasting their time on the latter sort of case.

(to be fair, one of the warezmongers apparently used his job to supply customers’ credit card numbers to buy software with, which is thoroughly scummy behaviour and should be punished just as severely as any other ID theft. However, most of them didn’t.)

My perspective is that the police should investigate only crimes against individuals. Companies should be free to carry out their own investigations against individuals and competitors who attempt to copy (or defraud, or blackmail) them, including obtaining warrants to disclose secret information based on reasonable suspicion as the police currently do. They should, however, have to do this at their own cost.

Not only is the current IP regime a nonsensical piece of corporate welfare in itself, IP enforcement is a nonsense. I resent the use of my tax money to track down people who are beneficial in strict economic terms (once a piece of IP exists, the most economically efficient outcome is to distribute it as widely as possible), who are only questionably harmful in any terms (the greatest advances in human invention came before the implementation of rigorous IP and patent law, and the idea that domestic use of pirated business software damages companies’ bottom lines appreciably is laughable), and who *certainly* only harm corporations who can afford to do the tracking-down themselves.

Matt Daws wins the inaugural SBBS Arguing About Abortion Awards, for not only spotting the vital premise: "such arguments are essentially pointless", but also remembering the author’s previously expressed views.

Larry comes a close second, with views as well-justified as Matt plus the image of the author running amok with a chainsaw in a maternity ward. However, he loses the top spot for lacking Mr Dawes’ willingness to admit the futility of even bothering to have this debate when we’re all starting from such insanely different premises.

Honourable mentions also go to Squander Two, with a set of well-expressed points (the willingness to admit that there is no solution, without the willingness to say this makes the whole bloody thing pointless counts both for and against S2 here), Matt T (who gained many points for adding stats where others were bolloxing about hypotheticals, but lost a few for emotive reductions of the argument), and dsquared, who wins a million points for quotable quotes, but loses them again for failure to back said quotes up.

Andrew Bartlett only said one thing, but it was sensible. So did Ally, and she’s a woman, and therefore the only person to actually have the right to participate in the debate under the original conditions expressed [*]. And Jimmy Doyle wins the Oliver Kamm Wooden Spoon for condescension, vapid verbosity and unprovoked personal abuse. The prize is an hour’s tutorial with Jimmy Doyle, so it’s probably just as well for all concerned that things turned out the way they did.

The next SBBS Arguing About Abortion Awards will take place either when hell freezes over, or when four randomly selected, well-educated people can sit in a room and have an argument about abortion that doesn’t turn into an acrimonious and bitter ranting match. And lo, the pot has spoken.

Also, some clarifications:

1) I’m well aware that my original opinion on this matter makes absolute sense if you believe the foetus not to be a person, none whatsoever if you believe it to be one, and somewhere in between if your views are elsewhere.

2) I stand by my views on the Catholic church (not the ‘burn them all’, but the dislike of clerical authority and teachings that Mr Doyle labels as ‘shallowness, ignorance and bigotry’). I believe, on the empirical evidence, that the world would be a better place should the Catholic church cease to exist tomorrow (just as I believe about Wahabbi Islam, Protestant fundamentalism, and the VHP). On the same basis, I really don’t care whether or not the Church of England, the Quakers or the Baha’i continue to exist: none is doing any serious harm (or indeed, anything particularly serious) any longer.

[*] The male-dominated nature of the debate may or may not say a great deal about men, the Internet, SBBS readers, or all three.

No man should hold any views on abortion other than these. Or in the event that they do, then they should seriously consider shutting the fuck up about them until they’re, say, bearing an unwanted child.

This is not an issue on which males have any right to decree what should happen, and only supreme arrogance would lead one to conclude otherwise.

Hang on. Shouldn’t we be lynching this woman’s Puritan neighbours, rather than banning her from wearing what she likes in her own home?

It may be time to emigrate, or possibly just to go on some kind of idiot-killing spree.

Sean Gabb has many weird views. Nonetheless, his recent article on how the British judiciary is effectively creating a system of checks and balances, to make up for the fact that Parliament no longer constrains the executive, is well-written and well worth reading.

There was a time where, when Catholic clergymen tried to interfere in British politics, we burned then at the stake. Sometime I think this might be a good policy to reintroduce. Or failing that, some less fatal way of making them shut up.

Honourable Fiend agrees. Guido doesn’t, but does illustrate the amusing way in which conservatives have learned the traditional liberal pursuit of pretend outrage at imagined racism.

Obviously, hating the leaders and beliefs of the institution that is the Roman Catholic church along with, but slightly more than, other organised religions is not racist. Just necessary.

(updated to reflect the ambiguity between ‘Catholic church’ meaning ‘all people who are Catholic’ and ‘Catholic church’ meaning ‘the leaders and institutions of the Roman Catholic church’.)