They Don't Like It Up 'Em

There has been much astonishment over the severity of sentence handed down to Nick Hogan following his stand against the quite ludicrous UK smoking ban. However, as a timely, and rather good, piece on CiF on the subject of the 'war on drugs' mentions, the state is a past master at disproportionately punishing attacks on its authority.

Jennifer Abel highlights the fact that drug laws themselves can arguably kill, and yet drug dealers can sometimes attract harsher sentences than murderers.

What rationale makes authorities believe selling illicit powder warrants a higher penalty than strangling the life out of a person? Is it simply that people who take drugs are seen as misfits? As Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World:

"No offence is as heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual – and after all, what is an individual? We can make a new one with the greatest ease – as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself."

It requires no propaganda, let alone dangerous traps, to convince people that murder, assault or theft should be crimes; those tricks justify crimes not against individuals or even property, but the nebulous victim named "society."

In other words, the public fully understand that violent crime is despicable, but government view attacks on society as a more serious offence, so we require convincing of that.

But who decides what society should be? Who determines which practices and pastimes are acceptable?

You're well ahead of me, of course. In the current dictatorial environment, it is government itself who rules on morality, dictates how we should conduct ourselves, and sets degrees of punishment. MPs decide society. MPs decide what you and I should be allowed to do.

Nick's crime was, officially, contempt of court for not paying his fine, and nothing to do with the ban, but the cause of the contempt charge was a quite shocking punishment in excess of £11,000, imposed thanks to a collusion between central and local government.

I'm sure the righteous will point to our democracy as justification for such a heavy penalty, but it's quite clear that a majority of voters have never believed, and still don't, that a blanket ban is the best way of tackling a minor problem.

Politicians themselves decided this policy, with no recourse to the interests or mores of those they are elected to serve. As Leg Iron points out in the case of upcoming huge increases in duties on spirits, the only people the state listen to are those they pay to tell them what they want to hear.

Under the "nuclear option" plan for increasing duty – designed to appease the health lobby and show that ministers are serious about tackling the problems caused by binge drinking – the cost of a bottle of spirits would rocket, along with the cost of spirit-based alcopops favoured by young drinkers.

Designed to appease the Righteous puritans. Not one jot of concern for the people who vote for them. Just their big pals in their Soviet-style quangos and fakecharities. You and me, voters, we don't count. We just have to do as we are told.

A six month tariff is the state trying to convince us that Nick Hogan was assaulting all of society with his stance. That his crime wasn't an inconsequential one, oh no. He was threatening all citizens of the UK and perverting society.

No-one believes that. No-one, that is, except a few shrill psychopathic cretins in and around the fevered lobby communities of Westminster, but that's the message we are meant to take from it, and anyone who vocally disagrees must swallow the state's sadistic medicine.

Nick Hogan stood up to a fundamentally unjust, and deeply undemocratic, law imposed by a corrupt and morally bankrupt government. His isn't an attack on society. In fact, it is the reverse, as Mencken once reasoned.

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who loves his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

And this is why Hogan is considered dangerous, and why the system studiously constructed by our legislators has concluded that he must be severely punished.

He didn't kowtow to an irrational definition of society, entirely fabricated in this country by 646 hideous bansturbators and their Igor-esque rent-seekers, instead he resisted.

And as far as the state is concerned, that is the most heinous crime of all.

UPDATE: Old Holborn has set up a donate facility to free Nick. The fine is paid and he walks. Show government how 'popular' their law is by contributing in the sidebar on the right.