Far-right extremist told to "read classic literature" or go to jail

[Gurke and Hare]

Because the judge probably knows the classics inside out from his expensive education and isn't going to give himself a load of extra homework by making nazi boy read something he isn't already very familiar with. It's quite fantastically pointless.

And yet, no more fantastically pointless than sending him to prison would have been.

The problem isn't that he wasn't sent to prison for downloading some stuff off the internet. The problem is all the people that are.

[Fambo Number Mive]

Hope Not Hate have asked the Attorney General to review the case.

[Icehaven]

And yet, no more fantastically pointless than sending him to prison would have been.

The problem isn't that he wasn't sent to prison for downloading some stuff off the internet. The problem is all the people that are.

Well a better idea would have been to do as Fambo suggested and get him to read some books that are actually relevant to his crime. At my work we had a several members of a banned far right group in for quite some time and one of them borrowed a book called Creeping Fascism, which was about the recent insidious rise of the right in Europe and what should be done to combat it, and it was promptly taken off him and handed back to me with the distinct implication I shouldn't have let him have it in the first place, the reason being it had the word 'fascism' in the title even though it was arguing the exact opposite of his beliefs. Maybe they thought it'd galvanise him or something but I disagree that that was reason enough to stop him having it, and apart from anything else it just enhanced the feeling of persecution the whole group had which was doing way more to firm his resolve than any innocuous book could.

[machotrouts]

Are we actually sure Hope is a better thing than Hate. Like has anyone checked this

[flotemysost]

Twelfth Night is basically "crikey, thought he was one of them gays for a moment, but turns out she was a lovely lady after all!" and everything on that list is white as fuck.

And how can we be sure there aren't any bomb-making instructions couched in any of these texts?

[chveik]

Well a better idea would have been to do as Fambo suggested and get him to read some books that are actually relevant to his crime.

i think the ways of rehabiliation aren't necessarily that straightforward.

[chveik]

Twelfth Night is basically "crikey, thought he was one of them gays for a moment, but turns out she was a lovely lady after all!" and everything on that list is white as fuck.

when has 'white' started to be used this way, i see this all the time in music sites, it's a bit confusing

he could have made him read the count of montecristo i spose

[chveik]

there's someone in my step-sister's family that got sent to jail because he started to watch/read extremist islamic stuff online and whatnot.  it's a bit minority report like, to me it seems it would defeat the purpose of preventing bad shit happening, instead of trying other ways like that

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Yeah, seeing 'white' as a pejorative for canon or anything adjacent to high art makes me flinch.

Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.

i think the ways of rehabiliation aren't necessarily that straightforward.

yeah and the value of teaching literature/aesthetics isn't the particular perspective a work has on the world.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I don't think "different people experience life differently" is the key piece of information radicalised teenagers are missing, and its kind of weird when people act like it is.

[dissolute ocelot]

The Prevent antiterrorism strategy is meant to do exactly this rehabilitation for wannabe terrorists without anyone reading any Trollope.

[flotemysost]

when has 'white' started to be used this way, i see this all the time in music sites, it's a bit confusing

Yeah, seeing 'white' as a pejorative for canon or anything adjacent to high art makes me flinch.

It wasn't intended in an entirely serious po-faced type way, I was being a bit silly, but fwiw I just meant that there's very little obvious, positive representation of people of colour in the works of those writers (to my knowledge anyway, I haven't read that many of them). That a piece of art represents whiteness isn't a bad thing in itself of course, it's just a fact, but in this context it just struck me as sort of amusingly ironic - sorry for any confusion.

Obviously I'm not saying those works couldn't still teach someone valuable lessons in humanity and empathy and all that.

[Johnny Yesno]

Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.

James Brown is the Funky President of the Sloane Rangers.

[Buelligan]

Oliver Kamm is the arsehole of the Universe.

[Johnny Yesno]

The judge should have thrown the book at him.

[chveik]

It wasn't intended in an entirely serious po-faced type way, I was being a bit silly, but fwiw I just meant that there's very little obvious, positive representation of people of colour in the works of those writers (to my knowledge anyway, I haven't read that many of them). That a piece of art represents whiteness isn't a bad thing in itself of course, it's just a fact, but in this context it just struck me as sort of amusingly ironic - sorry for any confusion.

it's just that i struggle to understand the use of "whiteness' as an aesthetic category, maybe i'm wrong but i feel it's different than just saying that black people aren't represented or simply present in a work of fiction or something of that order. i should take some time to think about this

[H-O-W-L]

I'm not sure if reading Oliver Twist, where the character Fagin is mainly referred to as just 'the Jew' throughout the novel

Only in the original printings, surely? I remember Dickens got fanmail from a Jewish friend who called him out for his antisemitism and he realized what a cunt he had been and recanted it and rewrote Fagin to be distinctly less antisemitic?

[Johnny Yesno]

i should take some time to think about this

Yes. It's clear what she meant.

[chveik]

Yes. It's clear what she meant.

yes i understand what she means in that particular context, not in absolute terms

[Icehaven]

i think the ways of rehabiliation aren't necessarily that straightforward.

No one's saying it is, obviously. It's just if court ordered book reading is going to happen then at least "sentence" books that have some relevance to the case/offence, rather than just what the judge thinks every young upstanding person should have read because he had to. Ideally an experienced judge, backed by the entire legal system, could come up with something a bit more effective than prison or read some old books of his choosing. I don't know what that is, if I did I wouldn't be on here discussing it with you good people, I'd be trying to implement it, but I don't.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

The problem with using 'white' as an aesthetic category is that it implies the qualities that lead a work to becoming canonical are only easily accessible to 'white' people, so effectively pulls up the draw bridge to people aren't white. It's very, very hard to make an argument against certain works having a universal value based around representation that doesn't covertly keep universality for certain ideological position, but protected as a disavowed universality that doesn't suffer interrogation beyond the label you give it. Hence Ralph Wiley's reply to Saul Bellow - "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership"

the implication is that, for whatever reason, people who are 'white' don't need to be represented in aesthetics and narrative in order to understand them a white person can move from James Brown records to P G Wodehouse to Kenneth Anger without a bother - but people outside of this group require representation and aesthetic objects are useless to them unless it provides that, typified by 'white' things, so they need Beethoven like a fish needs a bike. Hate this colonial arse assumption (not that its being made here)

Its not really new feminists critics went all over this same issue with the use of 'masculine' and 'male' as literary categories by radical feminist critics in the 1960s and 1970s. Present liberal discourse on "whiteness" is a very familar kind of disavowal. The popularity of Robin DiAngelo and her ilk in media and journalism is emblematic of this. Whats the point of an antiracism which shatters on contact to the meerest hint of an anticolonial argument

[chveik]

Ideally an experienced judge, backed by the entire legal system, could come up with something a bit more effective than prison or read some old books of his choosing. I don't know what that is, if I did I wouldn't be on here discussing it with you good people, I'd be trying to implement it, but I don't.

i think it's not question of failing to imagine alternatives to prison but a political decision. there's no reason why we couldn't experiment stuff

also i think it's difficult to pinpoint exactly how one changes their opinions, and the thing with classics is that they aren't arbitrarily called that way, they are more likely to have an effect on someone than some antiracist essay for instance, however convincing the demonstration is. i dunno, at least 19th century literature had an important influence on Marx's understanding of class struggle, maybe that could change that guy's perspective on the world, fuck knows. i guess it's somewhat idealistic, and judges aren't known to be particularly in fighting the social fabric that fuels these ideas

[Pijlstaart]

Some wasted first-name opportunities there, parents dun goofed and I suspect everything that ensued is their fault.

Punishment by boardgame would make more sense, perhaps a trip to the science museum gone horribly wrong, but not reading, reading wouldn't work, suppose the law is glacial and constrained by the mediums of the epoch. In fifty years time it'll be houseless avocado-smeared millennial judges crybullying a hated deliveroo underclass with "shoutouts" to the dwindling media of their time from the comfort of a charlie chalk memorial highchair "I thententh you to watch the thtar warth prequel trilogy foundathional to britith valueth and our nathional character. No true thtar warth fan would thtoop to rathism, the thtar warth brotherth were never rathist to whatever the jar-jar wath, even though they could have been and if anything he wath the real rathist, a timeleth lethon of rethraint and inthructive to all".

It depends what you want from the justice system really, for me i'd prefer it to revolve around acts of deference to dying men in costumes, the alternative would be anarchy. Don't wear the rubber bib into court, blared the judge through his full-body cataract, daddy doesn't feel respected if he can't spy some tit through the bib, contempt of court, who here remembers onkybloks, and you'd all better raise your hand or I'll get you!

[Ian Drunken Smurf]

Sounds like a glorious scam to peddle Readers Digest editions in faux leather to him on a weekly basis. Guaranteed to impress visitors to one's home...

[Johnny Yesno]

Some wasted first-name opportunities there, parents dun goofed and I suspect everything that ensued is their fault.

Punishment by boardgame would make more sense, perhaps a trip to the science museum gone horribly wrong, but not reading, reading wouldn't work, suppose the law is glacial and constrained by the mediums of the epoch. In fifty years time it'll be houseless avocado-smeared millennial judges crybullying a hated deliveroo underclass with "shoutouts" to the dwindling media of their time from the comfort of a charlie chalk memorial highchair "I thententh you to watch the thtar warth prequel trilogy foundathional to britith valueth and our nathional character. No true thtar warth fan would thtoop to rathism, the thtar warth brotherth were never rathist to whatever the jar-jar wath, even though they could have been and if anything he wath the real rathist, a timeleth lethon of rethraint and inthructive to all".

It depends what you want from the justice system really, for me i'd prefer it to revolve around acts of deference to dying men in costumes, the alternative would be anarchy. Don't wear the rubber bib into court, blared the judge through his full-body cataract, daddy doesn't feel respected if he can't spy some tit through the bib, contempt of court, who here remembers onkybloks, and you'd all better raise your hand or I'll get you!

You see VGF2000? This is how you write a compelling argument.

Yours is just a verbose statement of the bleeding obvious based on your misunderstanding of what someone else posted.

[Paul Calf]

Some wasted first-name opportunities there, parents dun goofed and I suspect everything that ensued is their fault.

Punishment by boardgame would make more sense, perhaps a trip to the science museum gone horribly wrong, but not reading, reading wouldn't work, suppose the law is glacial and constrained by the mediums of the epoch. In fifty years time it'll be houseless avocado-smeared millennial judges crybullying a hated deliveroo underclass with "shoutouts" to the dwindling media of their time from the comfort of a charlie chalk memorial highchair "I thententh you to watch the thtar warth prequel trilogy foundathional to britith valueth and our nathional character. No true thtar warth fan would thtoop to rathism, the thtar warth brotherth were never rathist to whatever the jar-jar wath, even though they could have been and if anything he wath the real rathist, a timeleth lethon of rethraint and inthructive to all".

It depends what you want from the justice system really, for me i'd prefer it to revolve around acts of deference to dying men in costumes, the alternative would be anarchy. Don't wear the rubber bib into court, blared the judge through his full-body cataract, daddy doesn't feel respected if he can't spy some tit through the bib, contempt of court, who here remembers onkybloks, and you'd all better raise your hand or I'll get you!

I mean, who knows what's going to happen?

[Video Game Fan 2000]

the bleeding obvious

if only

[Petey Pate]

Only in the original printings, surely? I remember Dickens got fanmail from a Jewish friend who called him out for his antisemitism and he realized what a cunt he had been and recanted it and rewrote Fagin to be distinctly less antisemitic?

He may have toned it down a bit, but the copy I remember reading as a child (printed in the 1950s I think) definitely referred to Fagin as 'the Jew' throughout in the first 38 chapters.

Fake Edit: According to Wikipedia, we're basically both correct.

Eliza Davis, whose husband had purchased Dickens's home in 1860 when he had put it up for sale, wrote to Dickens in protest against his portrayal of Jews (specifically Fagin), arguing that he had "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew", and that he had done a great wrong to the Jewish people. Dickens had described her husband at the time of the sale as a "Jewish moneylender", though the former would eventually describe the latter as an "honest gentleman".

Dickens protested that he was merely being factual about the realities of street crime in London in his depiction of criminals in their "squalid misery", yet he took Mrs Davis's complaint seriously; he halted the printing of Oliver Twist, and changed the text for the parts of the book that had not been set, which is why Fagin is called "the Jew" 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely at all in the next 179 references to him.

[Endicott]

Sentence overturned at the court of appeal. The little shit's gone to jail.

[dissolute ocelot]

Poetic justice. No early release for time spent reading Dickens.