…have been laid bare in England:
The Left-liberal camp is in overdrive in its campaign to rewrite history (or, in its own vocabulary, to alter consciousness): you did not see thousands of jubilant thugs rampaging through the streets, destroying livelihoods and property for the sheer exultant joy of it. What you saw were society’s victims responding to any or all of the following: bankers’ bonuses, MPs cheating on their expenses, unemployment, government spending cuts, poverty, social inequality, etc, etc. Their crimes were simply part of the same package of callous selfishness displayed by (as one particularly bizarre equation had it) tabloid phone hackers.
What is not ludicrous and insulting to common sense in these propositions is contradictory in its own terms. There are indeed views of the human condition which hold that all species of wickedness are connected, because they are all rooted in the fact that man is a fallen creature. But somehow I doubt that the ardent liberal secularists who were piping up last week were believers in original sin or the machinations of the Devil.
The moral equivalence that they wanted to establish between looters and arsonists on the one hand, and the perpetrators of any other kind of bad behaviour you can think of on the other, was rooted in ideological, not theological, orthodoxy. The rioting gangs could not simply be what they seemed – what they so obviously were – because that would be a devastating victory for the judgment of popular opinion over the fantasies of liberalism.
There’s actually nothing “liberal” about it.
The same two words I used to describe the South Central LA riots after the Rodney King trial:
Lawless opportunists.
In both cases, neo-Marxists like Maxine Waters (the congresscritter who caught herself in mid-sentence in a public hearing advocating “socializing”/nationalizing the US oil companies) and her ideological fellow thugs in Britain are seizing the opportunity to say that the leftward shift in the overall political class underway since 1988 (in 1980, Bush 41 described the subsequently-successful application of supply-side principles as “vodoo economics”, as you may recall) is bad in that it hasn’t gone far enough.
Far more likely scenario is Maggie Thatcher describing the fall of socialism as occurring when the world’s pols run out of other peoples’ money to spend.
The pols who have studiously created a dependent class in this way will find out that the more violent among them have no shared ideology with them; they are looters, and couldn’t give a crap who their victims are.
That was the lesson of the LA riots. And, as always, the solution that the Marxists desire is to take away the guns of the people being looted.
The reason for that is equally stark, once you make the correct association: the Marxists currently in charge of both the US government and the Democract party are looters themselves, and prefer to use the government’s power of coercion to keep themselves from being shot, too.
The catch here: we couldn’t do much about getting rid of the rioting looters, but we can vote the elected looters out of office.
And, we have been.
And, we will.
I do wish people decrying the so-called “liberals” and their attitudes would refrain from doing so in religious terms. Man is NOT a “fallen” creature, as that would require that we had once been better than we are. We’re a higher form of ape, burdened with our animal heritage and all the flaws that carry over from that state, magnified and oftentimes perverted by our intellect.
One doesn’t have to believe in the Devil, or any other supernatural excuse, to agree that humans are intrinsically selfish creatures, with the degree of selfishness being tempered or exacerbated by upbringing and native capacity to recognize the utility of un-selfish, or rationally selfish, behavior.
The looters were indulging in the most base, short-term, unenlightened variety of selfishness. The kind that’s inculcated and exacerbated by their being spoiled by their society. No responsibility and no consequences = no reason not to be an utterly selfish animal.
It is the nature of mankind to act in self interest. Depending on the expected consequences society applies and the clarity with which a man sees his self interest, this nature can result in anything from mob behavior and thuggery to a wealthy civilized society.
Breed a generation or more of entitlement mentality, criminalize self defense, excuse real criminal behavior, and finally face reality that the “entitlements” can not continue as expected, and you get a tender box waiting for a spark to erupt into riots.
I do wish people decrying the so-called “liberals” and their attitudes would refrain from doing so in religious terms.
It seems appropriate to me. A lot of these liberal beliefs are just as dogmatic and ritualistic as anything you’d find in a church or mosque. If the practice of them were somehow formalized, say at a university-like environment, they’d be a religion (which of course, I think has already happened).
Man is NOT a “fallen” creature, as that would require that we had once been better than we are.
Even back in the 19th Century, they were idolizing Nature and those closest to it, such as the Noble Savage. I imagine I can with some googling turn up supporting evidence from the past to the present, without a break.
It’s also worth noting that there’s a similar group which has been idolizing Revolution and acts of massive law-breaking and destruction for a similar length of time. These guys created religions such as Communism. All I can say is that if you can’t achieve your aims in a democratic society without revolution or anarchy, then maybe your goals are too destructive or reprehensible to warrant carrying out.
Problem is, it’s impossible to vote the unelected looters out of office. Financiers, lawyers and bureaucrats of various stripes have never been elected and yet have immense power. And I think that one, albeit small, factor in the riots was the knowledge that there were and are far too many people who live by parasitising people who actually work for a living producing useful items and providing useful services.
What, exactly, do the employees of bank casino divisions provide in the way of services, that justifies their six and seven-figure salaries and bonuses? And further, and just by way of example: I live in Blackpool, UK. This town has a population of around 150,000. And its (unelected) chief executive is paid a salary of about £175,000 – approximately £50,000 more than the salary of our Prime Minister. Why? Well, the actual reason is similar to the reason why board members of major corporations get such immense salaries. The committee that sets town CEO salaries is composed of (wait for it) town CEOs. Anyone else see a problem with that?
This is also another instance where leftists accept the Theory of Evolution to bolster their social status in “polite society”, yet they do not understand the theory. You are going to get a lot of “wickedness”, ie predatory behavior, from a predator that has a 2.5 million year evolutionary history of killing conscious beings for food. This nasty predatory creature even has genes for eating members of its own species!
http://news.discovery.com/human/early-humans-cannibalism-jewelry-110706.html
“Man is NOT a “fallen” creature, as that would require that we had once been better than we are. We’re a higher form of ape, burdened with our animal heritage and all the flaws that carry over from that state, magnified and oftentimes perverted by our intellect.”
“Fallen” means that we became self aware. With that self awareness comes value judgments on our actions.
Things were easier when we were just apes. You don’t get upset with a lion for killing the gazelle because that is what lions do.