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)
- The left seem to instinctively take the side of the criminals
(such as burglars)
over the decent people.
- Tony Martin
- jailed in England for shooting a burglar in 1999.
Freed after 3 years in prison.
- Padraig Nally
- jailed in Ireland for shooting a violent burglar in 2004.
Spent 1 year in prison.
Freed at re-trial.
- 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.
- 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.
-
He is a killer.
Double murder apparently.
Who did he kill?
They still won't tell us.
Nor will they tell us his name.
Criminals named on Internet forever
The Internet is a serious threat to the
privacy
of criminals.
It used to be that they were named in soon-lost newspaper reports.
Now they are named online forever.
It certainly looks as if something started to go wrong
in the UK in the 1960s.
That crime rose despite society getting far richer.
Stats from here
and here.
Likewise, as Ireland gets richer, it has more murders.
Stats from here.
How Ireland's wealth increased massively since 1950.
Contrary to left-wing dogma, this led to an increase, not decrease, in crime.
Stats from Angus Maddison.
As Ireland gets richer, it has more serious (indictable) crimes.
Stats from here.
Crime is not caused by poverty.
In the modern west, crime has
increased greatly as poverty has decreased
over the last 40 years.
- The Western poor
- Theodore Dalrymple,
with personal experience of thousands of underclass criminals,
writes more convincingly about the causes of crime than anyone I know.
-
The Most Politically Correct Magazine in the World
by Theodore Dalrymple
points out that
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.
-
Theodore Dalrymple:
"The BMJ's procrustean
theory of war is the liberal theory of crime writ large and applied on a global scale. Poverty makes men desperate, and desperation drives them to crime or (if they happen to control an army) to war. It is therefore up to us - the rich and contented portion of humanity - to prevent crime and war by paying more: for social welfare programs in the case of crime, for foreign aid in the case of war. ...
It is a tribute to the distorting power on educated minds of an abstract theory that anyone could believe such rubbish.
... The fact that crime in Britain has risen along with income should have been sufficient to persuade the BMJ that a more complex theory of human motivation was necessary: but the disregard of elementary reality is perhaps the distinguishing feature of much modern intellectual life."
- 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.
-
Left-wing dissent:
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
-
Owen Corrigan, 25 Jan 2010, provides a good example of how the left encourages crime.
-
Complaining about capitalism, he says:
"Cut taxes right back to the bone and abolish various welfare supports and you may well encourage people back into work. But don't start complaining when you have to step over the destitute on your way to your morning commute and don't be surprised when you get home to find you've been burgled by people driven to criminality."
-
You can almost hear his glee at the thought of
hard-working bourgeois middle-class people getting burgled.
- Of course, no burglar in the West is driven to it.
They do it because
that's the type of person they are.
They do it because
they are greedy, lazy, selfish bullies.
- 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.
- Sexual freedom
- Sex and censorship
Much political and social discussion
takes place in the absence of statistics,
and is driven by ideology (what we
want to be true)
instead of statistics (what
is true).
Even the fundamental difference between anecdote and statistics
is not grasped by many people.
- Many statistics are little known because they do not fit in
with the prevailing ideology.
We wish these things weren't true,
so we ignore them.
A few major examples are:
-
Child abuse, rape, and violence against women
are statistically far more common outside marriage than within marriage:
- Step-fathers are
(statistically) far more likely to abuse than natural fathers.
- Even
unmarried natural fathers are
statistically far more likely to abuse than
married natural fathers.
-
For unhappy marriages,
getting divorced is statistically a bad idea.
It will (statistically) make everyone more unhappy than staying together:
- Does Divorce Make People Happy?
(2002 study).
-
Happy marriages and unhappy divorces
by Mona Charen, July 19, 2002.
"The data show that if a couple is unhappy, the chances of their being happily married 5 years hence are 64 percent if they remain together but only 19 percent if they divorce and remarry.
...
Those who enter marriage with a dim (some might say accurate) view of divorce and a strong religious or other motivation for avoiding it are not only less likely to divorce, they are also less likely to be unhappy."
- Children of divorce have (statistically)
more problems of all types,
and are statistically more likely to divorce themselves.
This could lead to the heartless (yet objectively true) advice to your child
that if you want your marriage to last,
pick someone from a stable background
- someone whose parents have stayed together.
- While we're at it, married men are richer, live longer
and have more and better sex than single men.
Why are all these statistics so shocking
and contrary to the pious politically-correct
ideas we were taught growing up?
- Fatherhood
- The Heritage Foundation
- Institute for American Values
-
Parents' pursuit of happiness kills children:
Study estimates that if the United States enjoyed the same level of family stability today as it did in 1960, the nation would have
about 600,000 fewer kids receiving therapy, and
approximately 70,000 fewer suicides every year.
-
Why Marriage Matters: Twenty One Conclusions from the Social Sciences
summarises the statistical findings:
- Marriage increases the likelihood that fathers have good relationships with their children.
- Divorce and unmarried childbearing increase poverty for both children and mothers.
- Married couples seem to build more wealth on average than singles or cohabiting couples.
- Married men earn more money than do single men with similar education and job histories.
- Married people, especially married men, have longer life expectancies than do otherwise similar singles.
- Marriage is associated with better health and lower rates of injury, illness, and disability for both men and women.
- Divorce appears significantly to increase the risk of suicide.
- Married women appear to have a lower risk of experiencing domestic violence than do cohabiting or dating women.
- Parental marriage is associated with a sharply lower risk of infant mortality.
- Growing up outside an intact marriage increases the likelihood that children will themselves divorce or become unwed parents.
- Parental divorce (or failure to marry) appears to increase children's risk of school failure.
- Parental divorce reduces the likelihood that children will graduate from college and achieve high-status jobs.
- Children who live with their own two married parents enjoy better physical health, on average, than do children in other family forms.
- Children whose parents divorce have higher rates of psychological distress and mental illness.
- A child who is not living with his or her own two married parents is at greater risk of child abuse.
- There are many other statistics that make sense under an
evolutionary-biology or a conservative view, but that don't make
any sense under a PC view.
These statistics make conservatism look like it is based on reason
(so long as it doesn't go too far,
like actually banning sex outside marriage, etc.
like it did in the past).
And these statistics make PC ideas look like pure ideology,
hostile to reason and evidence.
Figures for child abuse and neglect by family type.
Colours are hard to read, but top-to-bottom maps to left-to-right.
("Married biological parents" is gold.)
There are few findings as solid as the fact that children are safest (by far) when their parents are married
and stay together.
From US Department of Health
"National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect"
Hat tip
Tony Allwright, Mar 2010.
-
Note there is far more abuse and neglect among step-parents and non-parents
(adopted parents, foster parents, "care")
than among married biological parents.
-
There is also far more abuse and neglect among unmarried biological parents than
among married biological parents.
-
Worst of all for abuse and neglect is the single mother with the live-in boyfriend.
(Feckless men being expected to care for children that are not even theirs.)
-
None of this would surprise any evolutionary biologist,
or indeed anyone who understands human nature,
but it seems to come as a surprise to the left.
Another strange position by western civil liberties groups
is to be against the death sentence
for murderers.
-
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.
-
John O'Sullivan
points out that the anti-death penalty position is:
"it is better to acquiesce reluctantly
in the murder of 820 innocent men than to execute
mistakenly 1 innocent man"
-
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).
The "United Killers of Benetton"
- The Benetton company,
who sell bland, crappy sweaters,
produced ads in 2000 with pictures of death row killers.
-
Nothing to do with their product.
Just designed to shock and get attention.
They even included child killers.
-
The photographer
Oliviero Toscani
chose to include nothing about the victims (of course).
He said:
"This campaign is not about victims. It is about the death penalty. The death penalty is unreligious.
The 10 Commandments say 'Thou shalt not kill.' It is against the law."
- Read here the stories of their victims
that Benetton was too cowardly to print.
It is unbelievable that Benetton would profit from people's grief
just to make money.
- Benetton's Evil Ads:
"Jesse Compton's profile is typical. A full-page headshot accompanies an interview. "What did you want to be when you grew up?" he is asked. "A lumberjack," he replies. The questioner follows up:
"What does it feel like when you're cutting through a tree?" Left unasked, however, is what it feels like to burn a three-year-old girl with a propane torch or puncture her stomach with a fork
- subjects that Compton became an authority on when he and his girlfriend tortured her daughter to death."
- Of course they do have some principles:
"Benetton's only condition is that the inmates be photographed in their normal prison clothes and not clothing which would promote another company, such as a Gap shirt."
3 year old
Tesslynn O'Cull (above)
was
beaten, burned, sexually assaulted, starved, tortured, mutilated
and finally murdered by her 20 year old "step-father"
Jesse Compton in Oregon in 1997.
Compton was sentenced to death by lethal injection,
but is still alive today
on death row.
Benetton sweaters thought it would be in good taste to feature
Jesse Compton
in an ad for their product.
See
petition to get his death sentence carried out.
Much of the population is to the right of me on crime
- 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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