Hard Concepts, Hard Time

Neil Gaiman is a writer who is perhaps most famous for his anthropomorphic personifications: dreams, death, despair and many other concepts humans have formed take bodies in his tales. They can be touched if they wish (though you might want to watch it with the second one, there); they talk, and travel, and fight.

Terry Pratchett is another author whose Discworld series has showed us the Tooth Fairy (actually a conglomerate), the Hogfather (a Santa Claus stand-in), and a Death who loves cats.

And now, the Canadian government is bringing that idea to life!

Here's the plan: Team Blue is planning to build new prisons and (improve current ones) because the rate of unreported crime went up from 1999 to 2004.

Let me repeat that.

Stockwell Day wants to build prisons because of the unreported crime rate. Now unless I'm thinking wrong, you can't actually catch, try, and jail someone who commits an unreported crime because the crime is unreported. So there's no one to put in these new jails. Which means he must be planning to imprison the concept of crime itself!

This is a startling development, to say the least.

Sure, you could "titch" away about the Conservatives' inability to come up with any reason for claiming their plans are going to cost $2 billion, or you could complain about the survey they quoted being from six years back and why are they talking about this now when a new one is coming out this fall. You could even point out that Team Blue is eliminating the long-form census because they don't think any census is valid after five years.

But you'd be missing the point.

The point is, if they can do this, if the Conservatives have somehow come up with a way to imprison the very idea of crime, then...

Hunger? You're next.