House of Dumb features thoughtful criticism of a man who finds it hard to join the herd when that herd gets all down-their-noses at an everyday misunderstood matricide.
Well…taking a position where you face down the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the Mirror all at once either demonstrates the kind of raw courage the SAS look for in their recruits or here’s a man who doesn’t mind cooking his own light suppers for a week or two. Oh, and the suburbs might twitch their lace curtains at him for a while as well. In the chip shops and kebab houses of the inner city, however, I suspect he’ll lose very few of his devoted friends.
“The belief that children are "devils", that they are feral beasts who if they aren't smashing up bus-stops are murdering their mothers, reveals far more about adult fears than it does about actual young people.”
Isn’t the definition of the liberal as someone who accepts the paleontological history of our species - that we’re essentially meat-eating and foraging pack animals from the scrublands of East Africa - yet who denies the possibility that the aggressiveness and potential for violence that for a couple of million years kept blunt-toothed, slow-moving, clawless omnivores alive and flourishing amongst various ambush predators from the savannas to the Arctic Circle did anything other than disappear amongst everyone (except for a few throwbacks) the moment that the ink was dry on first edition of The Social Contract? Really, Mr. O’Neill, where did all those instincts and hormones and genes to mount a counter-attack against lions or polar bears disappear to in the era When Periwigs Ruled the Earth?
For the most part, children who kill are unstable not evil; they are profoundly confused rather than consciously cruel. Yes, they sadly must be removed from society, but ideally for help and education, not in order to be punished or to suffer public ridicule.
What sort of therapy cures you of human nature, I wonder?
I confess, too, that I suspect him of a little bit of logical confusion when he asserts that removing a child from society (by putting him in prison) holds him up to public ridicule - unless they’re filming a reality TV series down at Tofu Borstal for Boys Who Want to be Girls, or wherever.
The lib meme of that old violence thing; it’s just so everything up until 1762 just keeps on being funny:
It was police and judges, for example, who took the disastrous decision to try the 10-year-old killers of James Bulger for murder in an adult court, riding roughshod over the idea that children under 14 were doli incapax – incapable of crime. It was the judge in that case who decided to release the names and photos of the Bulger killers, because they had committed an act "of unparalleled evil and barbarity". It was a commentator for the erudite Times who said that those two clearly very disturbed 10-year-olds were a "reminder of humanity’s most ancient and bestial instincts".
“…humanity’s most ancient and bestial instincts". And there’s the rub. In Libworld, humanity is a social construct and there are no “ancient instincts”: It’s all superstructure that functions to keep profit margins high and the toffs supping Champers at the Ritz.
Or something.
But seriously folks; what does O’Neill expect The Man to do nowadays? The, ahem, authorities haven’t got the will or the understanding to uphold whatever has worked since Adam was a lad (partly because they reject any book with Adam in it); including the sometimes-reasonable doli incapax. They’ve lost any sense of proportion and discrimination because they’ve thrown wisdom out along with God knows how many babies with the bathwater of all that excessive deference to authority that they wanted to eliminate in the 1960s. In so doing they ditched all the successful socializing (moralizing!) mechanisms upheld by the legitimacy conferred by ancient custom and tradition throughout history down to what every schoolboy knows - especially not to slaughter Mummy and little kids. And they did it on purpose. The permissive society trashed millennia-old mechanisms for rearing children not to be sociopaths by breaking the connection (until then held to be central to Western morality) between a moral choice and its consequences.
It acid-bathed the family by easy divorce (mea culpa, my friends: I can’t type this part so easily because of this beam right here); dissolving the moral and economic links between sexual intercourse, child-rearing and fatherhood via child-related welfare payments; and it infantilized parents themselves through an education system that never finds fault or points the finger of blame at any individual or corrects misbehaviour.
Certainly, it’s foolish to treat those too young to understand cause and effect and moral responsibility quite as if they were Jack the Ripper, and we can hope though not expect that imprisoned children might one day have their immorality replaced with morality, but the statist ‘youth’ snuck into the woodpile in the first place thanks to O’Neill’s pals’ mindset.
How else do you explain this piece Hobbesian set a sledgehammer to crack another sledge-hammer statist war-of-all-the-bureaucracies-against-all-the-other-bureaucracies?:
Schools which fail to teach pupils to read and write should be fined, an independent panel investigating the causes of last year's riots has said.
About a fifth of school leavers have the literacy skills of an 11-year-old or younger, leaving many with no stake in society and no reason to stay out of trouble, the riots communities and victims panel said.
Introducing fines, which would then be used to help bring children up to the required standards, would help ensure the risk of future riots on the scale seen last August was "significantly reduced", it said.
Got that?
Western morality = bad.
Individual responsibility = bad.
Nuclear family = bad.
Blame for and punishment of misbehaviour = bad.
Parental choice in education = bad.
Bureaucracies intended to replace anything nasty with tea and sympathy and understanding = good.
Riots = embarrassing after fifty years of social liberalism.
Solution = let’s punish our own libtard schools by using more dictatorial government power!
Letting parents take their children away from the violent jungles that so many inner city comprehensives have become by allowing other, non-tropical rainforest schools to exist just isn’t on the menu.
The panel also identified "500,000 forgotten families", citing poor parenting, a sense of hopelessness among young people, no clear path to work, reoffending and a lack of confidence in the police as key reasons behind the riots.
Say, does anyone out there know how reoffending can happen at all in our enlightened world of ASBOs and suspended sentences and community service orders?
Anyone? Anyone at all?
So what actually works? Well, how about more of the same?
Councils across London are working hard to build strong and resilient communities but the key to success lies in more joined-up services with responsibilities and funding available to make it work.Responding to today’s report by the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, London Councils – the body representing the capital’s 33 local authorities – said that boroughs need more freedom to ensure there is more sharing of information and funding for local schemes such as projects to tackle youth re-offending and early intervention work.
Brilliant. What could possibly go wrong?
Picture from here.
5 comments:
"What sort of therapy cures you of human nature, I wonder?"
Whatever it is, the progressives must get signed up for it at a very early age, since none of their schemes ever seem to take account of it!
Nah, they're little demons, all of 'em.
XX London Councils – the body representing the capital’s 33 local authorities – said that boroughs need more freedom to ensure there is more sharing of information....XX
Ahh, if I recall, London council was one of the shower of bastards that fought tooth and nail for "Data protection", which ensures it is virtualy impossible for one department to tell another the time of bloody DAY without a fucking warrant, wasnt it?
I wouldn't say Hobbsian, it reminds me more of Catch22.
Schools that fail to teach kids to read are fined.
The fines are to be used to bring children up to the required standard. What institution is going to be used for this.. No doubt the school that failed in the first place. Apart from an extra layer of bureaucracy what will have changed.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them. - Thomas Sowell
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