Anyway, that counts as a demographic factor doesn’t it?

The point is it’s not this tough on crime jibber jabber.

Actually the biggest driver of lower crime rates in the US since the early 1990s was Roe vs. Wade. R v W aborted a whole generation of “at risk” kids, who otherwise would have been committing crimes as we speak.

I assume you are so stuck in your opinions that extensive discourse is of little use.

The primary reason for the drop in crime rates in demographic shift. Any criminologist will tell you that. I speak as someone who has a first class honours thesis in US punishment policy.

The crime rates ballooned in the 1960s and 1970s as the baby boomers entered their teenage years and twenties.

The tough on crime phenomenon in the US goes back to 1969. It was intensified in the mid 1970s and 1980s. Crime only began to decline in the mid 1990s. Moreover, this occurred in all parts of the United States, including the smaller states that didn’t actively pursue tough on crime policies. This can be explained largely due to age shift and change in the composition of the inner cities.

There is basically no evidence of a deterrent effect gained by increasing penalties for crime. Some incapacitation effect is gained, but this is highly inefficient, as it only lasts as long as the person is incarcerated, which is extraordinarily costly, both in terms of direct costs (tens of thousands at least a year, and going towards $100 000 at the upper end) and indirect costs (loss of taxation, increased welfare dependency, social disintegration). Moreover, any incapacitation effect may be neutralised by the evidence that going to prison has a ‘criminalising’ effect on people.

Almost all criminologists - not just pseudo-radicals decked up on French theory - believe that the war on crime is one of the most absurd and useless policies in history. Most these guys are just pragmatic centrists.

The label of “Broken families� is not telling it like it is - unless it is meant to exclude those single parent families that work well, or that would have been worse off if the parents stayed married. It should also include those wealthy families in which domestic violence occurs. As a general description of single people or single parent families, it is not some strong-willed conservativism penetrating the idealised mystification of latte lefties, it is simple wrong.

You claim to be throwing away political pieties and getting to the facts - but in actual fact you are exceptionally dogmatic and unempirical. You will assume any covariation is a simplistic causal relationship if it benefits your policies. Predictable, cheap epithets like “latte lefties� seem to be the crux of your argument. This doesn’t get you very far, particularly when interlocutors like myself don’t fit that description.

Kolakowski is a God (irony intended). He is the person who has most changed the way I look at the world.

I am not even remotely religious, did not attend a religious school, and both my parents are atheists, so I am not really up on how contemporary Roman Catholics justify some of the nonsense they come out with on the tele. But my reading of history, particularly Augustine, suggests it is not that bloody difficult.

Maybe they argue that things like biochemists conducting reasearch on RNA transcription or archaeologists learning how to design and use plasma mass spectrometric devices that show ample evidence of human migration quite a bit longer than 7,000 years ago, are sure signs that these biochemists and archaeologists are not using this god-given knowledge to love god better.

Rather, maybe Pell, et. al see it as the work of demons conning biochemists and archaelogists to use this god-given knowledge only so they can turn their god-given love onto themselves, rather than god.

In which case, it is time to tell Pell, etc. that not only do they not understand Roman Catholicism or God, but more profouncly they would not know if their ass was on fire. Ergo they should shut the fuck up and stop making such silly tits of themselves.

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/01/02/intelligent-design-god-of-the-gaps/

May I direct your attentions to Augustine’s De Civitate Dei?

IF this thread isn’t a train wreck already……

http://larvatusprodeo.net/about-larvatus-prodeo/comments-policy/

David, your problem is that you’re just not looking at the world the way jack does.

The way I am “looking at the world” is based on direct experience of the front line of the Culture War, working in ethnicly diverse Texas and in visiting remote Aboriginal communities. A little bit more down to earth than the latte-land reveries of publicly subsidised wankers like Nabakov.

For a more rarified scientific analysis of how ideological vanities toxicly react with ethnological realities you could do worse than look at two studies recently published by two more or less liberal scholars, now mugged by reality.

Helen Hughes study shows how Cultural Leftist dreaming made a mess of the political culture and economy of remote Aboriginal communities. HC Coombs meant well, but he was in effect a reactionary of the worst kind. In fairness, I have witnessed at first hand how local artists have salvaged something from the wreckage.

Robert Putnam’s study shows how a lax and liberal immigration policy has helped turn LA into the worlds least liveable developed cities. My friends and contacts in LA and Santa Barbara still think he is being overly charitable. But what would these poor deluded fools know, merely from living there all their lives?

Putnam was so embarassed for his fellow Leftists he held off publication for years. But political embarassment is in pretty short supply with Larva-Prodders. Better to indulge in sophomoric humour whilst shoving certain horrors into the “too hard” basket. And then indulge in ostentatious indignation, for “not going through the correct channels” or “engaging in consultation”, when a politician has a proper crack at the problem.

One bit of cultural capital that can help unruly elements in the minorities integrate with general society and pull themselves out of downward spiral of depravity is organised religion: its institutional structures and inspirational scriptures. But we must spare no effort in kicking that can, musnt we?

The peevish and petulant undertone of this kind of New Leftists reminds me of the funny vibe coming off Old Leftists in the mid-seventies, when thir particular solution for all social problems was starting to look a little tired. Kolakowski noted that Leftist bad faith in his famous open letter to EP Thompson:

And in Western countries, virtually every intellectual who considers himself a socialist (or even communist) will admit in private talk that the socialist idea is in a deep crisis; few will admit this in print, here buoyant jauntiness is obligatory and we must not sow doubts and confusion “in the masses” or supply
our foes with arguments. I am not sure if you agree that this is a self-defeating policy, I rather think you do not.

.Ç?dʎʇ ɥɔnoʇ ʇ,uÉ?É” ı puÉ? ‘Ç?ɯ puıɥÇ?q buıʇʇıs sÉ?Ê? ʇı uÇ?ɥʇ ʇnq ‘punoɹ pɹÉ?oqÊŽÇ?Êž ʎɯ pÇ?uɹnʇ ı

Predatory males are the fault of the cultural left? Is there any evidence of a rise in the number of predatory males?

Even if this was not the case, how the hell can you blame it on the cultural left?

Absolutely. The Cultural Lefts fingerprints are all over immigration policy during the high tide of “social liberalism”, from the mid seventies through early nineties. More predatory males are generated by bad cultural policy: letting them in, breeding them and cultivating them. Lax selection and mad settlement policies certainly increased the ratio of predatory Alpha males either coming in or growing up, as any resident of W Sydney could testify during the long crime wave.

Sydney’s surge in predatory male hate crime can be put down to poor cultural policy:

The most brutal, most brazen discrimination committed in Australia, by Australians against Australians in recent decades - discrimination that was sexual and racial and violent - was committed against scores of young women in Sydney over an extended period between 1998 and 2002.
…
“In reality, the rape figure is much higher. Many girls don’t have the courage to face these young men. They are ruthless; they have no regard for the law. It has absolutely nothing to do with religion, but they operate like mini tribes.

A third NSW police officer, Sergeant Frank Reitano, agrees: “The Middle East gangs have very little respect for police. They are aggressive all the time with us.”

And of course free-for-all libertarianism and self-determinism have made things much worse for Aboriginals, esp mothers trying to bring up children. Theres your vicious effect of cultural leftism right there.

Just because you do not will a consequence does not mean that you are not responsible. No doubt GW Bush and his neo-con Martial Rightists were perfectly sincere in not wanting a civil war when regime changing Iraq. But they got one jus the same. And should rightly be hectored and pilloried for the result.

Likewise the cultural disasters amongst minorities that Theophanous, HC Coombs and his merry band of Cultural Leftists have set in train were no part of their original intention. Nonetheless their stupid policies are in part responsible for the vicious outcomes.

David says:

Contrary to popular opinion, crime is decreasing, not increasing (based on both self-report surveys and official rates).

Crime has gone down recently due to…Cultural Rightist law and order policies. And a more authoritarian approach to welfare. The prisons are overflowing with convicts in both AUS and US.

OT, I note that the best sociological surveys conclude that religion has a negative effect on crime, controlling for other factors and irrespective of secular trends:

Using a cross-sectional county-level data set from the year 2000, I am able to generate findings similar to those of a number of past sociological and economic studies that find a negative and significant relationship between religious adherence and crime.

David says:

“Broken families� is an offensive construct.

I am sorry if I offend thee with my blunt speak. A few years listening to screeching Leftists at Uni Melb a couple of decades ago has coarsened my sensibilities.

The meaning of “broken families” in the Culture War context is plain for anyone with any experience of Aboriginal settlements or any any area of concentrated disadvantage. “The Pines”, for example.

As far as I can see it is not a race-, age- and gender-specific term. So I am not guilty of formenting bigotry. I am guilty of calling a spade a spade, which I gather is a hanging offence in some parts.

1ɯʇɥ.dı1ÉŸ/ɯoÉ”.pÉ?ÉŸÊŒÇ?ɹ.Ê?Ê?Ê?//:dʇʇɥ :oʇ ob ɹo

.ʇı ʇɹoddns ʇÉ?ɥʇ suoıssÇ?ɹdɯı puÉ? spıoʇɔÉ?ÉŸ ’sʇɔÉ?ÉŸ Ç?ɥʇ Ç?ɯÉ?ɹɟ puÉ? puıɟ uÇ?ɥʇ puÉ? ʇsɹıɟ ʎɹoÇ?ɥʇ É? Ç?ʇÉ?Ç?ɹɔ oʇ sı ɥɔıɥÊ?

Even if raging pomos have had the dominance over policy he seems to think they have had, correlation does not equal causation! Just because social problems exist, some no doubt getting worse, does not mean you can blame them on the ‘cultural left’. Nothing is a panacea - the real question is whether things would be any better under a conservative policy. Certainly various areas of the USA have always been dominated by harshly punitive policy. These areas have some of the highest rates of violent crime in the liberal democratic world. Of course I wouldn’t lapse into Jack’s crappy social science and suggest that conservatism caused the problems. But at the very least, it does suggest that social problems and ‘lawlessness’ etc cannot be blamed on the cultural left.

“Why does liberal-Leftism no longer strike such a resonant chord with the general populus?”

Since when has it ever struck a chord? I think it is tending towards increase.

The politics of moral dogmatism is dominated by older people adversely affected by globalisation. Everyone starts to look for irrational figures to blame if their pockets start to hurt; broad economic transformations are too complex, and too intangible to make good media copy.

So yes, moral dogmatism has had a boost in support, but is a conjunctural phenomenon, a bump in a general tendency towards the opposite direction. It is aging. Demographic shift will kill it. Studies of youth consistently show a ‘liberal leftist’ inclination - more so than ever before, I would suggest. When they aren’t liberal leftist, they are apathetic; they just don’t care enough to honour old tory rubbish.

The frequent UK response to the US experience is that it’s not relevant here. The US has a civic nationalism which facilitates the melting pot - the flags and pledges of allegiance But in fact US civic nationalism was deliberately invented at the end of the 19th century in the US precisely to replace an ethno-nationalism challenged by mass immigration. The implication is quite clear: it’s up to the UK to develop a comparable civic nationalism, a point that has not been lost on any of the protagonists in the UK debate to whom Putnam has been speaking, from Trevor Phillips to Ruth Kelly, as their frequent statements about British identity indicate. If you want to understand what’s driving the political establishment, read Putnam.

It’s the consciously invented Australian version of “civic nationalism” that you decry as “multi-culti” and “po-mo”. And this last paragraph could have been written just about you:

The only problem is that they seem to give more prominence to some of his ideas than others. Too often the public debate is skewed towards getting “them” to integrate with “us”, and conform to “our” norms of dress, culture and values. When this is allied to an aggressive rhetoric on the war against terror, it begins to sound like hectoring or some form of persecution. But Putnam is not talking about a top-down set of instructions on nationalism, but a much broader social process in which the host country changes as much as it, changes its new arrivals: through a collaborative effort of imagination and myriad individual experiences, new solidarity is forged. It’s a message of hope that he keenly hopes doesn’t get buried in sensationalist headlines about the short term cost of “hunkering”.

No one here is “playing the refs” when they rebutt your arguments Jack. You’re too obviously partisan to be given the black uniform and the whistle.

I think this is an astonishing claim… Predatory males are the fault of the cultural left? Is there any evidence of a rise in the number of predatory males? Contrary to popular opinion, crime is decreasing, not increasing (based on both self-report surveys and official rates).

Even if this was not the case, how the hell can you blame it on the cultural left?

“Broken families” is an offensive construct. Non-conventional families may indeed (primarily for economic reasons) correlate with social problems. But you keep that correlation separate to the construct itself. You don’t build a negative into the very name of the category. Many non-conventional families operate quite well, so calling them all by default broken is quite deceptive, and not social science at all. (On average black Americans commit more street crime than whites, but it would be quite wrong to use, say, “black street thugs” as a general description of black people. The negative correlation has to be kept separate to the construct itself.) The false implications of failing to follow basic principles of social science in this manner are indeed quite offensive.