It’s This Bad [Outsanding from Dalrymple on England's descent into liberal hell]

City Journal ^ | 4/18/2006 | Theodore Dalrymple

[joesnuffy]

Next thing you know they will be issuing warning tickets for
rape...or turning their backs on muslims building giant mosques and planning terror attacks from them...

[listenhillary]

Are WE past the point of no return I wonder?


Greart article BTW.

[pickrell]

"...It's a shame too. My wife and I spent our honeymoon there and went several times after that. It's a fascinating and beautiful country, but it ain't worth my life..."

What the author doesn't apparently realize is that, since effective gun-banning is in place in England- all violence has now stopped.

Therefore, if you suffer an accident at the hands of a mob, you need to realize that it was love that hurt you.

[alwaysconservative]

You've gotta love anyone who properly uses the term "Pecksniffian" in an article.

But, France? Oh dear. . .

[TalBlack]

"Both received sentences of 18 months, with an automatic nine-month remission, more or less as of right. In other words, they would serve nine months in prison for having destroyed the health and career of a completely innocent man, caused his wife untold suffering, and deprived three young children of a normal father."

Kill or permanently cripple them. Not in revenge but as a preventative measure.

[NutCrackerBoy]

Liberalism is social AIDS. Once entrenched, it removes a country's ability to resist more serious social diseases such as despotism.

That was one of the frustrating flaws of V for Vendetta, a flick with some energy but horribly muddled ideology. It portrayed the "sheeple" phenomenon while skipping completely what would have been its logical cause, which is exactly what Dalyrmple describes in this piece. On the other hand, while true that the left-wing social disease will lead to disaster, one possible manifestation of it could be the eventual rise of a Hitler type. I would forgive the movie if it predicted that history, but the film's notion is that modern-day conservatism leads to the portrayed dystopia.

[Billthedrill]

One consequence of the liberal intelligentsia’s long march through the institutions is the acceptance of the category of Thoughtcrime.

That pathetic apologia from the UCSD student regarding speech codes yesterday came to mind reading this. It is simply difficult to credit that normal, intelligent people are capable of repeating such palpable nonsense so solemnly and expect other people to accede to the mutual illusion. We aren't immune from this by any means.

[Malesherbes]

Yes, brilliant indeed, and Theodore Dalrymple has written an equally perceptive analysis about the situation that surrounds him in France. Sadly, virtually the same incidents he describes in Britain can and do happen in the USA in certain jurisdictions. The lesson in Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" is to separate yourself from such jurisdictions.

[Mr. Rational]

Thanks. Writing this the week of the Duke Lax fantasy just hits the nail on the head.

[pierrem15]

or the Pubs don't grow some cojones it will

The Pubs would need a scanning electron microscope to find their cojones.

[Tribune7]

I fear your right.

[Snickersnee]

Mene, mene, tekel upharsin

[RepoGirl]

Your comments hit home. I was a student in London in 1990, during the final days of Thatcher. It was a wonderful time, one of those personal "golden eras".

I visited the UK several times throughout the later 90s, and spent my final visit in July of 2001. Each time, I watched the city deteriorate until it was unrecognizable. The 'spirit' that was so tangible in '90 had disappeared.

My husband and I will celebrate our fifth anniversary this year (good gravy!) and since we didn't have a honeymoon, we were thinking about different cities to go to. London was suggested, and nostalgia made me consider it--but the place is so different. Just a shell of what it was.

[Campion]

It is more concerned that young men should not smoke cigarettes in prison or make silly jokes to policemen than that they should not attack and permanently maim their elders and betters.

And more concerned with taking firearms away from law-abiding citizens than with keeping criminals armed with rocks, sticks, and fists from brutalizing those law-abiding citizens.

But the root of this is that Britain has a socialist mindset -- Labour advances socialism and the Tories preserve it until Labour takes power again -- and socialism is fundamentally criminal at its root, being based on the confiscation (pronounced, "theft") of lawfully-earned property for the benefit of the idle. Hence a socialist state is almost guaranteed to take the side of criminals against the side of the law-abiding and productive. The socialists know who their friends are.

[ccmay]

“You were looking for trouble and prepared to use any excuse to visit violence on anyone you came by. It is the callousness of this that is so chilling. . . . You do not seem to care that others have been blighted by your gratuitous violence.”

Pretty fancy words the judge was using, showing off his public-school education no doubt. For all the uneducated yobbo understood of his lecture, he might as well have been speaking in Welsh.

This kind of thug only understands the language of hot lead and hard wood. Bringing back the rope is not sufficient; it's time to start hanging them in chains at crossroads, for the ravens to peck out their eyes.

-ccm

[LibertarianInExile]

This is a phenomenal quote:

"...one does not feel the defects of a foreign country in quite the same lacerating way as the defects of one’s native land; they are more an object of amused, detached interest than of personal despair."

[familyop]

"Simply brilliant"

...except that the author avoided writing about the main cause of the problem, even in such a wordy piece. He did manage to misrepresent his case by mentioning the family ties of only one young man, though.

[traviskicks]

thanks for posting that. the man is a great writer.

[NZerFromHK]

IMHO Britain day by day is turning more European (in the European Union sense). I have noticed in recent years angry readers who are furious with American retorts of European (I shall stress not necessarily British) anti-Americanism, and angry detractors of American patriotic articles on dates such as July 4 each year, have been Britons. These Britons are quite busy defending their European neighbours and joining them to bash their American brothers.

It is as if Thatcher's times as Prime Minister is ancient history now, and Britons have abandoned what she stood for in droves.

"The [English] Channel is wider than the Atlantic" is now firmly a thing of the past.

[NZerFromHK]

I wouldn't say it is socialism, but rather, a mindset that believes fundamentally power flows from those who are in charge. Sure, there are concepts of liberty, constraints of the political leaders' power, but deep down the source of power is granted to people from the Crown, and it is deemed common sense over in Britain to believe that to maintain order in society, that government should do something "deemed sensible" in the way of combating disorder.

Because of this belief, explaining the US's Second Amendment might as well be talking to them in Malay.