Crime
The state has almost ceased to attack innocent people
in the West,
with the
Drug War
being the last remaining major battlefield.
Apart from the Drug War,
the major way
that human rights and civil liberties are assaulted
in the West today
is by individuals attacking us.
I do not see why we should tolerate this any more
than we tolerate the state attacking us.
Once the drug issue is resolved, it seems the spotlight of the
civil liberties group should
finally swing away from the state
and towards crime:
- crime
(and here
and here)
- Crimenet
- victims post rewards to solve crimes.
- The left seem to instinctively take the side of the criminals
(such as burglars)
over the decent people.
- Tony Martin
- jailed for shooting a burglar.
Released after short sentence.
- Tony Martin Support Group
- Padraig Nally
- jailed for shooting a violent burglar.
Freed at re-trial.
Congratulations to the jury for showing wisdom and common sense.
- Padraig Nally Support Group
- Now they are over, the Martin and Nally cases
ultimately send the message that
burglars should not feel safe in other people's homes,
and their lives will be held cheap by society.
And that is a good message to send.
- Capitalism magazine
- Privacy
- friend of the thief, kidnapper, rapist,
torturer and killer
- Murderers of children
- James Bulger
- Guardian site
- Why do old-fashioned liberals always sympathise with killers?
- The Guardian also publishes
"Erwin James",
who served 20 years in prison,
and is now free to pontificate to the rest of us.
The Guardian do not have the guts to tell us
(a) his real name,
and (b) what he did.
One presumes he is a killer, but they won't tell us.
Typical Guardian.
Crime is not caused by poverty.
In the modern west, crime has increased greatly as poverty has decreased
over the last 40 years.
- Theodore Dalrymple,
with personal experience of thousands of underclass criminals,
writes more convincingly about the causes of crime than anyone I know.
-
As he points out,
the left disregards 5,000 years
of knowledge about
unchanging human nature,
and the nature of evil and selfishness,
and now believes that
crime is caused by deprivation and inequality,
terrorism is a response to oppression and suffering, and
war is caused by poverty and inequality.
-
As
Dalrymple
says,
"It is a tribute to the distorting power on educated minds of an
abstract theory that anyone
could believe such rubbish."
- The idea that crime and terrorism are logical responses to "oppression":
- Theodore Dalrymple
-
On criminals:
".. contrary to the modern sentimental view, not all
anger is justified or even sincere. Indeed, much of it is the
product of dishonesty and bad faith combined with sheer
ignorance. And far from assuaging this dishonest rage,
liberal breast-beating fans it, sustains it and appears to
justify it."
-
Why prison works
- "It is difficult to convince complacent middle-class intellectuals of the degree to which life in the poorest third of our society is dominated and further impoverished by crime and criminality."
Most crime is local,
and it's the respectable working class
who suffer the most.
The people to feel sorry for are
not the criminals (for sure),
and not so much the people who live in
middle class, low-crime areas.
The people to really feel sorry for are
non-criminals in
working class, high-crime areas.
- Zero Intolerance
- It is the poor that suffer when police are soft on crime.
Crime is caused by ideas, not by poverty.
Most criminals in the west are not decent people, starving and
"stealing a chicken to feed their family".
Feed their expensive drug, alcohol and gambling habits, perhaps -
while they beat up their family.
Or just lazy layabouts who want a DVD player but don't want to work.
Most criminals are greedy, lazy, selfish bullies.
It's old-fashioned language, and it's annoying for them to hear it.
But they need to hear it. Because that is what they are.
They are not victims. They are greedy, lazy, selfish bullies.
- Crime is caused by ideas.
Crime is caused by bad, selfish ideas in criminals' heads.
This is the only explanation that makes any sense for the vast increase in crime in the west.
And
much of modern popular and intellectual culture encourages those ideas.
- The theory that "Poverty causes crime":
- Yes, it is true that people with something to lose (a house, a job)
tend not to commit crime.
And that will always be true, whether crime rates are high or low.
But that does not mean that poverty causes crime.
First, poverty was greater in the past and crime was less.
- Second, let me suggest a much more disturbing theory for the left:
Saying that "poverty causes crime" causes crime.
You may not think that these rarified sociological ideas percolate down to the
uneducated criminals on the street, but as
Theodore Dalrymple
shows, they do.
In garbled form, through popular culture, criminals get the message that they are victims
and "society" owes them.
It is a message they are only too eager to hear.
Every selfish thug and bully likes to hear justifications for his actions.
Telling criminals that poverty causes crime is:
(1) encouraging the criminals, and:
(2) dismissing the noble majority of poorer people who get on with it
and work hard and try to better themselves.
- Ironically, comfortable middle class sociologists pronouncing in the media
that poverty and inequality cause crime,
may themselves be a cause of crime.
How else to explain the rising levels of crime as prosperity increased?
"Sociology causes crime" may be more true than
"Poverty causes crime".
Crime is caused by memes, not by poverty.
-
How Criminologists Foster Crime
by Theodore Dalrymple
- "It is probably no coincidence that the profession of criminology underwent a vast expansion
at about the same time that criminal activity began the steepest part of its exponential rise.
...
Of course, it might have been that the problem of crime called forth its students.
But since social problems are often of a dialectical nature, could it not also have been that
the students called forth their problem?
...
Since the cause of crime is the decision of criminals to commit it,
what goes on in their minds is not irrelevant. Ideas filter down selectively from the academy
into the population at large, through discussions (and often bowdlerizations)
in the papers and on TV, and become intellectual currency. In this way, the ideas of criminologists
could actually become a cause of crime."
- The book
A Land Fit for Criminals
by David Fraser
- Another cause of crime is clearly
the breakdown of the family,
the absence of fathers,
and an increased toleration for the abandonment of mothers and children
while men move on in search of more fulfilling
sexual relationships.
The almost total breakdown of the traditional family is a dominant feature,
perhaps the most dominant feature, of
high-crime, "underclass" areas in the West.
- You should party in
the sexual revolution,
not raise children in it:
-
While the middle class experiment with sexual chaos when young,
they often avoid pregancy, get a career first, get married and then have children,
often very late, in their 30s.
And I quite like these aspects of
the sexual revolution,
and would not like to turn the clock back.
But people need to be responsible with their freedom,
by using contraception diligently, and not having children
until you have a career and a stable relationship for life.
The middle classes are often responsible, instinctively
(if only because they worry about their careers).
-
As
Theodore Dalrymple
shows,
the underclass, however,
live in the world of sexual chaos that the middle class only flirt with.
They raise their children in this world, rather than just partying in it.
They take the ideas of the sexual revolution theorists seriously,
which in many ways the middle class do not.
And these bad ideas - that families are not necessary to raise children
- are clearly a major cause of crime and dysfunction.
- Dalrymple is different to many writers on family breakdown and the sexual revolution
because he is not religious. In fact, he is an atheist.
He is simply interested in whether
the sexual revolution
has made the underclass happy.
To which the answer is obviously no.
It has led to an increase, not decrease,
in rape, domestic violence, child abuse,
and all forms of abuse of women and children.
-
Another strange position by western civil liberties groups
is to be against the death sentence.
The one valid argument against the death sentence, it seems to me,
is that sometimes you will get the wrong person.
-
The argument against this, though,
is that less innocent people will die
than if murderers stay alive -
some of whom will
kill again within prison and after they leave
(there are case histories like
these
everywhere).
The errors of justice, in this view,
are to be regarded as terrible
accidents in an imperfect human world, like car accidents
(which, because we allow cars to exist,
kill at least a thousand times
more innocents every year)
or civilian casualties in war,
and everything possible should be done to minimise
such accidents (e.g. by repeatedly examining the case for years
before execution).
Whether this argument is convincing or not,
it is certainly true that the position that will lead
to the death of the most innocents
is the anti-death-penalty position.
-
In any case,
civil liberties groups argue that even if it is the right person,
it is immoral to kill them.
This to me is simply a dogmatic assertion.
Some people believe that killers have an inalienable "right to life".
I don't.
Morality, human rights and civil liberties do not really "exist".
They are invented by us in order to preserve civilization.
Believing that such rights should only apply to
innocent humans
is a perfectly reasonable
philosophy.
- I would also support the death penalty for permanently disabling someone
(brain damaging someone,
setting someone on fire, cutting off their limbs).
- To summarise, I've no problem with there being no death penalty,
if that is what society wants.
My problem is with civil liberties groups
who have their blind spots
and who fail to recognise
that
crime is a civil liberties issue.
And the issue is the civil liberties of the victims.
-
British public opinion on crime 2003 shows
of course that no death penalty
is not "what society wants".
If a free democratic vote was ever allowed, the death penalty would be restored
immediately:
- The majority polled support restoring the death penalty,
as they do in almost every poll in the west.
- Majority support householders using deadly force against intruders.
- Majority believe life should mean life.
- Majority want to allow trying twice for same crime.
- Majority support under-18s charged with murder being tried as adults.
- Majority support "3 strikes and you're out".
- Majority support
ID cards.
- In fact, I am constantly surprised at how
much of the population is to the right of me
on crime:
- The
Save the Newchurch Guinea Pigs
animal rights terrorists
were given 12 year sentences in 2006,
which I thought about right, even a little high, given they did not kill anyone.
A survey
(see details)
shows 45 percent agree with me that the sentences were about right,
but a further 40 percent think they should have got more.
Only 8 percent of people are to the left of me.
-
Surveys of western public on Islam and Islamism
show that the majority
agrees with me or is even to the right of me on these issues.
For example:
- 81 percent of Britons would deport foreigners who stir up racial and religious hatred,
even if to do so would endanger their lives.
- The majority of Americans say the US should not give any financial assistance
to the Palestinian Authority.
- If all other solutions fail,
74 percent in France support military strikes against Iran.
- 56 per cent of Germans think there should be a ban on the building of mosques in Germany
as long as the building of churches in some Islamic states is forbidden.
- Crime is the same. The majority of the population have sensible views on crime,
formed in the real world, often as a result of real experience with criminals.
-
Survey about the execution of Saddam
(also here),
Dec 2006, again shows I am mainstream.
The majority of the population agrees with me:
- 82 percent of Americans supported the death penalty for Saddam.
- 69 percent of British supported the death penalty for Saddam.
- 58 percent of French supported the death penalty for Saddam.
- 53 percent of Germans supported the death penalty for Saddam.
- 51 percent of Spanish supported the death penalty for Saddam.
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