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| Liberals Miffed As Canine Cultural Studies Wins Course-of-the-Month | Job Growth Moderating; Or Is It? |
Brits Rail at US While Teen Thugs Run Riot
by Christopher Chantrill
July 07, 2006 at 4:32 am
THE BRITS HAVE a rather poor opinion of the United States, according to Ben Fenton. Only 12 percent of them think that the United States can be trusted to act responsibly on the world stage.
Britons, writes Anthony King, feel that
America appears to be a class-divided and racially divided society and one that fails to offer its citizens equality of opportunity. Nearly three quarters of Britons, 72 per cent, believe American society is essentially "unequal".
It is understandable that they would take a dim view of the US. It helps them to avoid examining the mess in their own country, where teenaged gangs seem to roam around without limit, according to Theodore Dalrymple. It seems to be considered rare sport for young thugs to loiter around and beat up on adults, sending them to hospital with serious brain injuries. And why not? The criminal justice system just gives them a slap on the wrist.
Peter Wareing, a 42-year-old barrister, was attacked in the street by a gang of youths, and suffered permanent brain injury. The two youthful thugs that beat him were sentenced to 18 months in jail and will likely get out in 9 months.
Wareing was no privileged insider, pampered by a privileged upbringing.
He was evidently a man of some spirit: having been a salesman, he decided to study for the law, supported himself at law school by a variety of manual jobs, and qualified at the bar at the age of 40. The extent of his recovery astounded his neurosurgeon, who attributed it to Wareing’s determination and “bloody-mindedness.”
Here’s another story. “An engineer—Philip Carroll, the father of four—was tinkering with his car outside his home. Four drunken youths sat on a wall on his property, and he asked them to leave.” They beat him and caused brain injury. Carroll may never work again. The culprit, Michael Kuba-Kuba, a talented athlete whose parents owned an African foods grocery store, got 12 months in jail. He said he acted in self-defense.
It’s just as well that the Brits are disgusted with the United States, its racism, its inequality, and its imperial ambitions in the world. They wouldn’t want to look at the unequal fight being waged on their own streets between peaceable householders and drunken teen thugs. That might be too unpleasant.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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