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.
Limerick man
Robert Sheehan and two friends
set two small children on fire
in Sept 2006.
The 4 year old and 6 year old
suffered horrific burns.
The Irish state declined to take seriously the protection of its citizens from this man,
and he was soon free to attack other people.
He attacked the wrong person
and was
shot dead in Sept 2012.
Photo from
here.
Martin McCaughey,
a businessman in Dundalk in 2008, sleeping at home with his wife and three children (age 10, 14 and 15) in the house,
woke up in the night to find this burglar,
Daniel McCormack
(above)
in his bedroom armed with a screwdriver.
McCaughey chased him out of the house, and chased him in his car, hitting him with the car
and stopping his escape.
Screenshot from
RTE.
Most people in Ireland would applaud.
But look at what happened next:
-
First, the burglar sued McCaughey for his injuries - and won.
McCaughey's car insurance paid the burglar €175,000
(without telling McCaughey).
-
Second, the burglar only got a suspended sentence for the burglary.
-
Third, the Irish state prosecuted McCaughey for assaulting the burglar.
Thankfully, the jury had far more sense than the state, and they spoke for all of Ireland when they acquitted him on 15 Feb 2012.
But it is cold comfort since McCaughey is left with legal bills over €100,000.
-
Almost every comment here
supports McCaughey.
No wonder the jury acquitted, if these commenters are representative.
One says:
"I wouldn't have had to hear too much of the evidence to return a Not Guilty verdict."
- Comment
probably sums up how the jury felt:
"any "scumbag" going up before a jury in Ireland today is not going to win
...
all the jury will be focusing on is the fact that the burglar was in someones house armed with a screwdriver before the incident.
...
you sit in a jury stand for a couple of days and everything else about the case is passing you by apart from the fact that the guy sitting over there could have possibly broken into your house".
-
There is no justice here.
The burglar should get years in jail.
McCaughey's wife should be able to sue the burglar
for invading her home and causing mental trauma
to her and her children.
Her
10 year old daughter
was terrified, and
could not sleep at the house for months afterwards.
Where's her compensation for that?
Ungrateful welfare youth loot and burn in English cities, Aug 2011, killing 5, for no reason.
- The England riots
- Metropolitan Police site
- Metropolitan Police Flickr
-
The Guardian's loony left-wing study
of the "causes" of the riots.
-
The Guardian, 8 Dec 2011, blames the police (sadly this is serious, not a satire)
and
complains that
nearly three-quarters of the rioting scum had been stopped and searched
in the previous year.
-
They think there is something wrong with this.
They do not draw the obvious conclusion - that the police are good at their job and know
who the criminal scum are
in each area.
- The Guardian also blames the riots on the fact that thieving scum
- who squandered their chances at school
and now live off the taxes of productive people -
feel "alienated" from society.
As if that is our fault, not theirs.
-
Neil O'Brien, December 5, 2011, destroys The Guardian's study.
He discovers that (surprise) the rioters were largely already criminals.
- 76 percent of rioters had previous convictions.
There were an incredible average of 11 previous offences per rioter.
- 45 percent of rioting males age 10-17 had previous convictions.
Compared to only 2 percent of all males age 10-17 in the population.
i.e. Young male rioters were 22 times more likely than the population to have a record.
- Neil O'Brien notes the rioters whining about the police in The Guardian's study:
"Criminals don't like the police. I'm shocked, shocked!"
-
Riots caused by police when they finally turned up, The Daily Mash, 5 Dec 2011, slags off The Guardian's study.
-
"According to a major survey most rioters said that if it was not for the police not being there they would probably not have stolen quite so many things.
One rioter said: "It was only when the police eventually arrived and prevented me from stealing my ninth Wii in two days that I got very angry and decided to go home and pretend I had been watching television the whole time."
Another rioter said: ..
"It was our chance to take back the streets where we hang around all day, frightening people."
"Also, I'm sick of having my knives confiscated.""
- If only The Guardian had this sense of humour.
If only The Guardian slagged off street scum,
instead of pandering to them.
- Nice to see the judges kicking these rioters hard:
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.
Max Roser
says if you look at a longer time period, the picture is different.
There was terrible crime in the pre-modern era.
The last century, though, still refutes the idea that crime is caused by poverty.
"Crime is caused by no police" seems to be the message from pre-modern times.
- I understand the desire to own a gun to defend yourself and your family against predators. Absolutely I understand it.
- The problem is that if that is legal, then the predators will all have guns too.
- I would like to have a gun.
But if I did, then every scumbag in my city would have one.
That sounds worse, not better.
- Does a gun ownership society work?
The way to find out is to do an experiment.
Have some Western countries widely allow guns, and some ban or heavily restrict them.
And see what happens.
- The experiment has already been done.
A gun ownership society
does not work.
- List of countries by homicide rate.
When I last looked in 2023:
- USA - 6.8 homicide victims per 100,000 inhabitants per year.
- UK - 1.0
- Ireland - 0.4
- France - 1.1
- Germany - 0.8
- Spain - 0.6
- Italy - 0.5
- Belgium - 1.1
- Netherlands - 0.7
- Norway - 0.5
- Sweden - 1.1
- Israel - 1.9
- Australia - 0.7
- Japan - 0.2
- List of countries by firearm-related homicide rate.
When I last looked in 2023:
- USA - 4.46 firearm-related homicide victims per 100,000 inhabitants per year.
- UK - 0.02
- Ireland - 0.21
- France - 0.12
- Germany - 0.06
- Spain - 0.10
- Italy - 0.29
- Belgium - 0.25
- Netherlands - 0.16
- Norway - 0.06
- Sweden - 0.40
- Israel - 0.68
- Australia - 0.15
- Japan - 0.00
- List of U.S. states by homicide rate
- Only 2 US states - Maine and New Hampshire - have homicide rates like European countries.
- Almost all states are well above European levels.
20 states have rates 10 times or more worse than Ireland.
- List of cities by homicide rate
- US cities v. European cities:
- Baltimore - 58.60
- New Orleans - 51.78
- Birmingham (US) - 49.60
- Detroit - 47.90
- Philadelphia - 35.70
- Washington - 31.85
- Chicago - 29.60
- Houston - 20.30
- LA - 10.30
- Austin - 8.20
- New York - 5.80
- Boston - 5.50
- Glasgow - 5.10
- Marseille - 3.50
- Zurich - 3.00
- Brussels - 2.80
- Amsterdam - 2.20
- Birmingham (UK) - 1.84
- London - 1.38
- Liverpool - 1.19
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.
-
The book
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009).
- This book
claims that
homicides increase with increased inequality (not poverty).
-
Even if there is something in this,
how does it explain the massive historical increase in homicides (and all crime)
in the West since the 1950s?
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.
- Fr. Peter McVerry
is a left-wing priest who works with the homeless, drug addicted, and
criminals.
-
But he seems to have little understanding of the suffering and fear these criminals inflict on
the decent, hard-working members of society.
-
Fr. Peter McVerry, 22 Aug 2012:
"the greatest suffering inflicted on Irish people in recent years was caused, not by burglars in jeans, but by professionals in designer suits."
- In the middle of a massive wave of
looting, arson and murder
in the United States in 2020,
trans author Vicky Osterweil
writes a book in defence of looting.
-
A great example of how ideas cause crime.
The people looting and burning corner stores, and beating and shooting shopkeepers,
will never read his book.
But the idea that "Looting is Resistance" will trickle down to the violent mobs on the streets
and make them feel better about their crimes.
- (I use "his book" because Vicky Osterweil is a man.)
- Intellectuals cause crime, and Vicky Osterweil
is a good example.
Crime is caused by ideas, not by poverty.
Crime is caused in part by the
ideas of comfortable middle-class intellectuals.
Leftist
Sally Kohn
provides a good example of this.
Here
on
27 Apr 2015
she
defends the
Baltimore riots
and attacks the police.
Her opinions are truly appalling.
And such bad ideas
do filter down to the underclass where they cause real damage.
Such ideas encourage rioting, looting, burglary and all sorts of crime.
Such ideas ruin the lives of ordinary people.
Here she is again
defending the George Floyd riots of May-June 2020.
One of the worst accounts on Twitter. Ideas like hers ruin the lives of ordinary people who are trying to work hard and build.
Family values (stable families prevent crime)
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, August 30, 2002,
finds that in the US, where some states have capital punishment and some don't,
there have been 820 murders committed by those who have already committed a murder,
served their sentence, and been released (or who murdered in prison).
These 820 innocent people would be alive if capital punishment had been used.
O'Sullivan says 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"
-
Norman Tebbit, September 18, 2012, says that in the UK,
since the death penalty was suspended,
about 150 people have been killed by persons previously convicted of homicide.
The ban on capital punishment has killed 150 innocent people so far in the UK,
about 3 people every year.
"Would our courts have sentenced to death three innocent people a year, year in year out? I doubt it."
-
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.
- prodeathpenalty.com
- Cases
tells you about the actual crimes and victims.
-
The
anti-death-penalty sites
never have the guts to tell you
about the victims.
- I would also support the death penalty for permanently disabling someone
(brain damaging someone,
setting someone on fire,
acid attack,
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.
Benetton sweaters thought it would be in good taste to feature
Jesse Compton
in an ad for their product.
Sadly, he was not executed, and in 2022 it was too late.
In 2022, the
death penalty in Oregon
was in effect abolished.
Compton got life without parole instead.
He is still alive today, while his innocent child victim died in 1997.
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.
- Death penalty by country.
The USA is an outlier among Western countries in having the death penalty.
But the people of Western countries often want it.
- YouGov surveys.
As at 2022, the majority of Brits support the death penalty.
- 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, 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.
