Jack,

What a delicious use of irony... However, I was merely
responding to a comment made by one of your fellow
countrymen who clearly had neither your delicacy of
touch or restraint.

Given the fact I'm about 20% english I don't really
give a toss what happened 160 years ago, although I
understand we're not the people these days shipping
people to a far away island and holding them prisoner..:-)
And it's today I'm mainly interested in.. Otherwise
we can discuss how many people were moved involuntarily
from where to where in the late 18th and 19th centuries..


Mark












At 09:24 09 February 2004, Jack wrote:
On 2/8/04 5:18 AM, in article -be
rlin.de,
'Mark Stevens' wrote:

And of course here in the UK we look with some amusement
at...the preventative affect on crime of a prison
incarceration
rate about eight times the european average.

If we just had a distant land, peopled only by a few
aboriginals, to which
we could send those misfits, I am sure it would be
much more economical than
sheltering and feeding them here at our expense. Our
surrounding moat is
also a bit narrow, in some places non-existent, and
I'm sure that reflects
badly somehow on our judgment and character. Perhaps
you Brits would be
willing to take on a few of tens of thousands of these
excessively
incarcerated individuals. Surely, you can make peaceful
productive citizens
of them simply by offering free medical care and an
environment in which
their potential victims have almost no means of defending
themselves.

If there were any imperfections or glaring anachronisms
in UK culture, I'm
sure I would be not only unqualified to criticize them
but also totally
uninterested, since I neither live, vote, nor pay taxes
there. Your
expertise on matters social has been noted however,
and I trust you won't
mind our calling on you to help us find our footing
in the swamp of
inadequacy and despair in which we find ourselves.

When you have taken a goodly number of those unfortunates
(whom we have so
obviously failed) and made them welcome as members
of your glider syndicate,
perhaps you would be so kind as to report on your progress
in teaching them
to spin Puchaz, and thereby draw this thread back on
topic.


-----
Jack
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