No Joke

In the US, they joke that a Republican is a Democrat who's been mugged.

Same goes for the UK:

In the week when the word “yob” was banned by Scotland Yard because it might “alienate” teenagers and injure their tender feelings (oh boo hoo), Stevens Nyembo-Ya-Muteba, 40, was murdered by a gang of “youths” outside his flat in Hackney, east London...

There are unsettling moments when I feel myself turning into a rabid old-school Tory, and this is one of them. What’s with the pathetic, weedy nonsense from Scotland Yard about hurting yobs’ feelings, when stories such as Stevens’s have, shamefully, become commonplace? Who cares about their feelings? I don’t. I couldn’t care less. I don’t care how hard their lives are: I don’t expect Stevens’s life in Kinshasa was much of a picnic either but at least he was doing his best to better himself to make a new life for his family. And I am so tired of the stupid liberal notion (held by me for decades) that gangs of hoodies are all gigantically deprived and thus need our pity, love and support, rather than our approbation. What they need, actually, is to be locked up.

-- Nick