Guido Fawkes

Is there any way I can get a RSS feed to his site, but with all the shit about the death penalty filtered out? While we're at it, can we get rid of the red sentences at the end of each paragraph (as if the posts aren't pithy enough, we need that for our tiny attention spans), the Saturday Seven Ups, and the tiresome constant talk about visitor numbers and past successes?

I don't even know where to start about his call for the death penalty for kid and cop killers. Some thoughts:

• The state shouldn't have the power of life and death over people. We don't want politicians posturing over this, and we don't want stays of execution to be political or matters of public opinion, which was a reason why it was abolished in the 1960s.
  
• Judges and juries are fallible, and statistics are very good at misleading people. It's foolish to pretend innocent people will never get executed.
  
• The death penalty is final and irreversible.
• Revenge isn't the same thing as justice.
• It probably doesn't act as a deterrent. Look at murder rates for US states that have it and those that don't. Pierrepoint observed that if it was a deterrent, he wouldn't have hanged a friend he saw at the pub every week who knew what his job was.
  
• It's moral vanity for some just like buying Fairtrade is for others.
• Murder is murder. It's stupid to pretend murder of a non-cop or non-child is less serious. Particularly with the police, it gets further and further from the idea of police being ordinary members of the public doing professionally what ordinary citizens should do anyway.
• Just because the public support something doesn't mean politicians should go ahead with something. It's also up to politicians and opinion-formers to take a lead on things and educate people about issues. Maybe if a majority of people support the death penalty, it's only an indication that it's been off the political agenda for a very long time with only the tabloids and people like Guido banging on about it. Opinion formers who have the status quo on their side don't go around arguing in favour of the status quo. Polls show people think it's worse for guilty people to be found innocent than for innocent people to be found guilty. This shows people need education on matters of justice.
  
• Without the death penalty, we are more able to pile weight on countries with the death penalty for minor things like smuggling drugs. If we have the death penalty, we are only able to criticise their choice of offences they execute for.
  

One thing this does is demonstrate that if Guido is a libertarian, he's a libertarian like the Tea Party are libertarians. They want a small state in financial terms, but it should still promote the moral code that suits them.