What is the world coming to?

[expat]

Agreed. A punishment that involves locking people up for long periods of time, where the expectation is to be regularly sodomised, beaten and to have all personal dignity removed, is way way more, IMHO, barbaric and such a total admission of societies failings than a simple birching, for example.

I agree. People seem to think that a prison term is nothing more than the inability to go where you want for a certain period of time. It looks to me much worse than that.

OTOH it doesn't stop a lot of criminals. Why is that?

[expat]

Documented crime might not be any different, but wher I am I don't hear stories every week of teenagers stabbing each other and I can go out for a quiet drink on a friday night without running into some pub fight.

Indeed: if you do actually spend time in British towns and in other places on the continent, you soon get an impression much too strong for it to be just an unsubstantiated prejudice.

Or I am spending my UK time in entirely the wrong places, but I actually think I am avoiding most of the worst; it is just that the norm is now pretty foul, weekend evenings at any rate.

[Ruprect]

Documented crime might not be any different, () but wher I am I don't hear stories every week of teenagers stabbing each other and I can go out for a quiet drink on a friday night without running into some pub fight.

So can I, and I'm in south east London

[NotAllThere]

Is crime worse in the UK than the rest of Europe?

Worse than Western Europe, probably.

[NotAllThere]

Agreed. A punishment that involves locking people up for long periods of time, where the expectation is to be regularly sodomised, beaten and to have all personal dignity removed, is way way more, IMHO, barbaric and such a total admission of societies failings than a simple birching, for example.

Also the effect of breaking up the family unit. Though with some families, that's probably not a bad thing.

[Ruprect]

Also the effect of breaking up the family unit. Though with some families, that's probably not a bad thing.

keep going! this is seriously entertaining!

[expat]

Also the effect of breaking up the family unit. Though with some families, that's probably not a bad thing.

That's not new, of course. Wasn't it Evelyn Waugh who characterised a boy as being "younger than his sister by the length of a stiff sentence for housebreaking"?

[NotAllThere]

keep going! this is seriously entertaining!

Well, work with me then! Which bit? The idea that the destruction of the family unit is a bad thing. Or the idea that the destruction of the family unit is a good thing.

[threaded]

1997 was the right time to emigrate.

Amen to that.

Well, if you're a techie, you only need English in Denmark realistically. So here's one place, and if you don't live in the city the people are generally much nicer than the UK. They often say they want Danish as well, but that's mostly just the lazy excuse they give if they don't want you, but can't be bothered to think of something better.

But for arseholes, Denmark isn't much better. Except here they don't speak English (or comprehensible Danish for that matter) so you generally don't know what is upsetting them.

The general level of low level violence in Copenhagen is quite high compared to the UK. There's always someone you see when wandering about the office with a black eye. But you can generally avoid it, if you know what to do.

This time of year being on your own on a lonely stretch of road in the dark is generally asking for a car full of drunks to pull up and give you a beating. Luckily I'm on a bike and most times can make my escape. Others I know have not been so lucky, and only a few days ago a chap was stabbed to death for no better reason than he was on his own, waiting to cross the road.

If you're on a train you do not speak, otherwise they can hear you're a foreigner and that is asking to be attacked. With obvious foreign looking guys getting it worse.

Driving a car about in Copenhagen is an utter nightmare. You'd think with the fantastic price of cars here they'd take care, and there isnt that much traffic really so there's no need for the stress level, but no, it is a war zone. On my cycle commute I regularly come across the remains of serious traffic accidents and actually capture on my helmet camera one or two a month. Only a few days ago, whilst it was snowing, a guy on a practically empty motorway got upset he had to change lanes when he caught up with a slower moving car, so overtook, pulled in front, and slammed his brakes on causing a pileup and killing several people.

Funnily enough, many people who stop cycling this time of year and take to their cars and public transport, is not because of the cold, it rarely gets really cold, but because of the risk of being attacked because it is dark and they're on their own. Many long distance commuter cyclists have the absolute minimum of lights and reflectors so they cannot be seen, yet don't get fined by the police for not having any. It's not like the UK, here the cycle paths are generally quite seperate from the road so it's not like the cars need to see you.

My girly, who's a Policeofficer, told me of a case where one neighbour trained their dogs to go to neighbours gardens to do their business, they caused several fender benders as they crossed the roads unattended, eventually this escalated into a murder. Why did they train their dogs to do this? Because they didn't like to clean up after them.

So all in all the general level of arseholeishness is higher than what I remember of the UK, and the risks involved in a confrontation are significantly higher, but as long as your wealthy enough so you can avoid the city it's really quite a nice place.

[EternalOptimist]

A couple of gigs ago, I worked with a young lady from Brazil. It was at a time when school bullying was in the news.
She genuinely did not understand the concept of kids bullying other kids. The shock on her face was clear.