The prolonged rioting in England has evidently been the greatest fun to those participating. While they were smashing up shops and stealing whatever they could, the young rioters often found time to tell astonished reporters that they didn’t have any cares or worries about what they were doing, and they would carry on until caught. All the while they kept smiling because they knew they wouldn’t be caught.
Presumably from fear of being accused of overreacting, the police often stood by and took no action even when they could see the smashing and stealing in the street they were in. The rioters seem sure that they are in their rights to help themselves to whatever they want, to wreck shopkeepers, and set fires that burnt out homes and forced one woman to jump out of a blazing upper-floor window (she survived traumatised but miraculously unhurt).
After this party comes the hangover. Those caught looting are a cross-section of the population, they range in age from children to forty-year-olds; one is the daughter of a company director, another is a teaching assistant. What unites them is the sense that they were doing no wrong, and were entitled to take possession of desirable goods. The fact that the police didn’t or couldn’t prevent them but merely watched reinforced the sense of entitlement, as though they were tacitly being allowed to get on with it.
And that is the core of these events. Decades of misconceived social engineering by liberals has caught up with the country, and hit it in the face. Everything and anything that might have provided these rioters with grounds for respecting themselves and others has been systematically undermined by the they-must-be-free-to-express-themselves brigade of liberals. Post-1945 England has been remodeled to be rid of the values that made the country what it had been, and introduce new dogma. No family solidarity, no discipline, no culture, no education, no concept of law, no patriotism: Heavy-duty social engineering of the kind ends in a Hobbesian freedom that self-destructs. Politicians and intellectuals lost in ideological fantasies have made these rioters the pitiful mindless creatures that they are.
When a society refuses to enforce property rights, it's a done deal!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA done deal for the society, that is...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseShoot the cursed rioters.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYour article merely asserts your thesis. You give no evidence to link the rioters' actions with the social ideology and engineering you claim is responsible. You give me nothing to take away with which to discuss and debate with people opposed to the notion that liberal social ideology and training is responsible for such reprehensible social behavior. Cite some evidence and examples, please, for those of us not as informed as you.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe proof is that liberal ideas ruled England for 3 generations and ideas and policies have consequences.Or dont they?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHow quickly we seem to have forgotten Thatcher. And does Pryce-Jones mean "liberal" in the US sense of the term, or the UK sense?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBeautifully put. Thank you.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis is not good, but may I suggest it's not the end of the world,either?
During the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin, the fighting damaged some shops and since the police were otherwise engaged, that led to looting in short order- and Ireland in 1916 can only be described as Victorian/Edwardian (at best!)in its morals and mores. But poor women mobbed the dress shops, and kids busted into the candy stores, jewelry shops suffered, and so forth. If there had been big screen TVs in those days, they surely would've been carted off, too.
That's what's scary about a mob: even respectable and orderly people can hear that siren call and throw off their respect for law in a heartbeat. To be sure, the liberal welfare state mas made it pathetically easy to do so. But the Old Adam lurks forever underneath, whoever's in charge....
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYes, Ellen, it was merely a simple, unhappy rant; but it probably was intended for those who are already aware of the long, sad history of social engineering experiments, where clever new constructs are supposed to replace the accumulated wisdom of the millennia -- always with few or no real, long-term benefits, but often with numerous unintended and unfortunate results.
If you really need proofs for debating the issue, no blog comments could suffice. You are looking in the wrong kind of place. I could charitably assume that you are not quite as ignorant of the failures of the past half century of social engineering as you imply, and that you simply hoped to read a succinct Pryce-Jones proof; but I still have a working, old school BS detector, and see no need to be charitable in this instance.
Your blinders have served you well enough so far. You would be wise to leave it at that.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI found this blog through a link from the BreakPoint.org site. I've never heard of or read this author's blogs before.
Amazing, but true, I am just recently pulling my head out of the sand of daily living and providing for my family and becoming more self-educated on the liberal mind-set that is so foreign to my experience and beliefs.
What benefit is there in simply writing those already in the know? If someone like me, who is already basically in agreement with the author's assertions, reads this post with no new information or educating points to put into my debating kit, then what of someone in complete disagreement with the author? This kind of post only serves to strengthen the walls between two antagonistic, disagreeing ideologies. It wouldn't take much to put in a few examples supporting the thesis.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEllen M, -- On the whole, political comments on the Internet amount to a lot of verbal jousting. It seems that, after 15 years on the internet, I have gotten a bit too cynical. My apologies.
The BreakPoint.org site looks interesting. Thanks for the link.
You will generally find the National Review Online website to be an excellent source for understanding both liberal and conservative viewpoints. It is hard to debate liberals, though. Their ideology is a secular religion, and they defend even their worst nonsense with ferocity, if not good logic.
A case in point is the recent, highly coordinated attempts by liberals to blame the USA credit rating downgrade on the Tea Party, as if the Congress and Presidents who presided over the past decades of virulent over-spending and recent skyrocketing deficits had nothing to do with it. They cynically play on the emotions and envy of the (too-often unthinking) electorate.
Unfortunately, since about half the voting population either pays no federal taxes or gets its income from the federal government, we are almost at a point of no return in hoping for a turnaround in the current fiscal irresponsibility. The Tea Party at least finally made a strong point that we can't keep kicking the debt can down the road, but the liberals prevented the Republican efforts to stop it.
No lender now considers the profligate USA Congress to be a top-ranked credit risk, so a downgrade has been inevitable for months if nothing was done about the debt. True to form, the big-spending liberals then blamed the Tea Party for the downgrade.
I wish you well in your debates.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYet nowhere can be found a Dem/Prog/Lib member of that cabal condeming the sociopaths they created. Why's that?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWelcome to the world of "A Clockwork Orange".
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