Andrew Anthony – The Day Reality Hit Home
What all these reactions had in common, I realised, was not complexity but simplicity. For all of them this was an issue of the powerless striking back at the powerful, the oppressed against the oppressor, the rebels against the imperialists. It was Han Solo and Luke Skywalker taking on the Death Star. There was no serious attempt to examine what kind of power the powerless wanted to assume, or over whom they wanted to exercise it, and no one thought to ask by what authority these suicidal killers had been designated the voice of the oppressed. It was enough that Palestinians had danced in the West Bank. The scale of the suffering, the innocence of the victims and the aims of the perpetrators barely seemed to register in many of the comments. Was this a sign of shock or complacency? Or was it something else, a kind of atrophying of moral faculties, brought on by prolonged use of fixed ideas, that prevented the sufferer from recognising a new paradigm when it arrived, no matter how spectacular its announcement?
In the end I reached the conclusion that 11 September had already brutally confirmed: there were other forces, far more malign than America, that lay in wait in the world. But having faced up to the basic issue of comparative international threats, could I stop the political reassessment there? If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true?
Nearer the end, observations on the real world societal consequences of multi-cult;
We may hear a great deal about ’empowering communities’ but few self-respecting liberals would want to spell out what that power should actually mean. Even a scheme as tame as Neighbourhood Watch, in which residents report suspicious activity to the police, runs counter to progressive thought.
[…]
Evidence both statistical and anecdotal suggests that in a ‘community of communities’ there is not enough social glue to create a sense of shared responsibility. Studies show that bystanders are less likely to come to the aid of someone of a different ethnicity from their own. The girl I saw stabbed was of Asian appearance. Her attackers were Afro-Caribbean. And nearly all the onlookers were, for want of a better phrase, white. Difference is all very well but it is with sameness, a common humanity, that we most pressingly need to reconnect.
It will be a tough read for our friends on the left here.
h/t
Well that’s one collected into the realm of reality!
What are the odds on getting a significant number of the remaining 100 million or so Left-o-roids ?
The majority of the left will never move out of the realm of the Cloud Dwellers, will never move out of their insistence that ‘if only’ you people behave as we tell you – then, Utopia will exist.
The left, quite frankly, are the cause of this malaise and social collapse. That is because the left claims that all problems are caused by the gov’t or by the collective – never the individual. And that all solutions are within the control of the Proper Gov’t – never the individual.
This rejection of individual causality and responsiblity by the left – is the basic cause of the exponential increase in the violence of individual against individual, in the increase in gangs and gang violence.
Criminality is not caused by poverty; it is caused by psychological malaise; i.e., by the rejection of individual causality and responsibility.
It is the left, who always spring to the defence of the criminal – who inform us that ‘it really isn’t their fault that they rob, rape, murder’. It’s society’s fault – because the person robs, rapes, murders – because they are: Poor. Were abused as a child. On drugs. Beaten by ex-husband. etc. The litany of excuses are always the same. The point is – the individual is never, ever, responsible. It is always the fault of the society.
Therefore – since criminal behaviour in our society is not defined as carried out by an individual – but instead, the criminal individual is merely an aberrant result of an aberrant society – we accept criminal behaviour. It’s our fault anyway – if they rob, rape and murder us.
The ‘right’, however, insists on individualism – the individual is responsible for his own actions – whether that be to remain in poverty, or to rob, rape and murder. The left, as noted, rejects any and all individual responsibility.
Equally, the left – with their focus on poverty as the ‘root cause’ of all evil, further assists criminality. They define the criminal as not only not responsible for his actions because society is really, really responsible. But, the ’cause’ of his bad behaviour is – the wealthy person.
So- the person who works, saves, invests etc – that individual hardworker is the ‘root cause’ of criminal behaviour. The monstrous illogicality and cloud fog of the left – is astonishing.
Globalization does not cause group poverty; that is caused by the failure of these groups to industrialize as a middle class structure.
I remind SDA readers of Hans Rosling’s marvellous graphic outline, showing that globalization most definitely enriches rather than impoverishes. Google Hans Rosling.
Multiculturalism, a pet myth of the left, isolates people into irresponsible groups – which view Others as almost non-human, and view themselves internally, as beyond any rule of law.
“That is because the left claims that all problems are caused by the gov’t or by the collective – never the individual. And that all solutions are within the control of the Proper Gov’t – never the individual.”
This is news to me. Didn’t I read an op-ed about a year ago from Buzz Hargrove condemning our “obession” with individualism? Naturally he argued for MORE collectivism.
I argee that the Left typically champions more government as the solution to many problems, but I think the Left blames individualism and what they see as individualism’s inherent selfishness as the root of society’s ills.
But the individual is not inherently selfish; our species is a social species; the individual cannot exist alone. What we should be encouraging is the individual should be understood as responsible for his actions. The left refuses this; they consider that the individual – alone – is a ‘brute’ and must be controlled by the society.
The left denigrates the individual as a reprehensible ‘thing’ – whose ‘brute impulses’ must be ‘socialized’ by the collective. The left disagrees that individual is responsible. The only solution, for the left, is to reject individualism and insist on collective control. The Big Brother of the Unions is an example- and Hargrove doesn’t want any individual confronting him and disagreeing. You are all Union members. Or else.
ET – you’ve said a mouthful and I agree with every word you wrote.
The astonishing thing about 9/11 is how many didn’t and still refuse to re-examine the core truths they thought were valid on 9/10. But, then, that’s the human condition. I know so many middle-aged people that are fossilized in their thinking. The three ideas they framed the world with in their youth, in spite of time and new information, remain fixed, never to be updated to meet new circumstances.
All war is bad, all cultures and religions are equivalent, unions are needed by the little guy, the rich fleece the poor, you get my point….who’s the worst, the most closed-minded, intractable group, the groupthink left. Theirs is really a a problem of arrested developement. It pretty much describes the Democratic party here in the States.
Oh, and, God forbid that a responsible dialogue on the failure of black males would be permitted, can’t examine that, it runs counter to the core myths.
As far as the WOT, if pre-WWII Europe is a good template, we can count on a sizeable number staying clueless to the grave.
What are the odds on getting a significant number of the remaining 100 million or so Left-o-roids ?
0%
the rich fleece the poor,
People worried about this should emmigrate to Africa there are hardly any rich people to fleece them. The morons will be way better off and if not who cares.
Well-said, ET.
Individual responsibility and accountability have been thrown out the collective societal window, and we’re left with, as you say, the leftoid-speak “inevitability” (sic), of criminal behaviour in an imperfect society borne of imperfect, dysfunctional, and often poor, families.
The only problem with this leftoid view of the world is that lots of individuals from imperfect, poor, and dysfunctional families are utterly responsible and accountable, and never behave as criminals.
Leftoids never account for these exemplary individuals and never model solutions after the common elements that account for their (individual) successes in life. The “social glue” that holds these individuals’ lives together and which helps vibrant communities to be built, responsible individual by responsible individual, usually includes strong, intact families, something lib-lefties eschew, and, very often, membership in a faith community, another no-no on the lefties’ list of things to avoid at all costs.
We need common goals and values, as Andrew Anthony says, to be motivated to share and care. Sadly, our Charter has all but blown to smithereens our sense of “the common good” and “common law” on which Canadian society was built and did rather well under until our “friends on the left” declared mores and conventions that clearly worked to be null and void.
BTW, there’s a total difference between individualism and individual responsibility.
A world of difference.
Individual responsibility and accountability recognize that there are other human beings in the world besides yourself and that you are NOT, I repeat, NOT the centre of the universe. Your responsibility is to take into account other’s needs, aspirations, and “rights,” as well as your own.
This is what the Judeo-Christian Scriptures refer to as “loving your neighbour as yourself.”
It works. It’s sustainable. It builds viable and compassionate communities.
Just imagine if some christians force conversion of some new age earth worshipping eco-wacko the liberal left-wing news media would make this big headlines in all the major birdcage linners and fish wrappers and all the talking heads would be blabbering for days about it
And if you are new to SDA and the world of reality, you can always get another stiff shot by reading something by Mark Steyn (steynonline.com). Cheers and welcome to the first day of the rest of your (reality-based) life!
exactly right – been round the block – individual responsibility is different from the left focus on the individual, for indiv. responsibility acknowledges that you are NOT the centre of the universe.
But, the left view is that the world consists of YOU and your emotions, your ‘passions’; your ‘opinions’; your ‘desires’; your ‘feelings’. These are privileged above anyone else’s emotions, desires. Because they are ‘essential’ or ‘innate’ – they are ‘pure’.
They are linked to the utopianism of the left. What the left wants is for a society that enables everyone to express this isolate self-absorbed individual emotionalism. This is taught in our schools – with a constant insistence that you ‘express yourself’. This is an unaccountable set of emotions; it’s valid not for any ethical, moral or rational reason; it’s valid only because it is YOU.
Then, the left puts this emotionally self-absorbed individual into the society – and views the society as responsible for satisfying the individual. The society must nurture, support, promote etc the individual so that he can ‘express himself’. And, if anything goes wrong – the society is responsible. Never the individual.
It’s a completely insane system.
Isn’t what you just described, ET, “…[the] emotionally self-absorbed individual [with]…society [being] responsible for…nurtur[ing], support[ing], promot[ing]…the individual so that he can ‘express himself'” the description of a parasite?
I find it interesting that his wife was in New York on 9/11 and was scheduled to be on a plane to Washington that day. I wonder how he would have reacted in the absence of such a personal connection.
It is best to realize that neither left nor right have the answers to the evil we see in society.
The left wants to improve the “inputs” the right want to reward/punish the “outcomes”. A combination of the two will as far as possible create a safer society but we have to be aware that the evil we see is part of our nature and to completely eliminate the evil we would have to eliminate the nature. Fortunately that is impossible because if we eliminated the evil nature we would also eliminate the good nature that is inexorably intertwined into that thing that is pure evil and pure good, Mankind.
Mankind that thing that only the Creator can truly love.
Peace
A relavant commentary:
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/thornton082407.html
Globalization does not cause group poverty…
No, it just causes poisonings and subjects people to sub-standard goods.
Anyway, I wonder if the slave labour in China would agree?
“What are the odds on getting a significant number of the remaining 100 million or so Left-o-roids ?”
I think you need to do a recount. The worldview expressed on this blog represents a shrinking minority in Canada and the United States.
If the author of this article thinks living in the UK is dangerous he should try living in a big city in the United States.
Or, Jose, try living in Toronto. Almost 70 violent deaths this year and it’s only the end of August. Like I commented somewhere else, New York City feels safer than Toronto. In NYC there’s a police presence on every corner in the downtown core. In Toronto? You won’t see a police[wo]man anywhere at any time.
Noo Yawk’s been cleaned up considerably. Toronto reminds me of New York at the end of the ’70s: panhandler heaven, druggies vacantly wandering in Times Square, random violence every night, a powder keg, in other words.
David Miller and crew don’t seem to have a clue how to make things better because they refuse to name the problem and they refuse to make difficult decisions. You see, they want to be “nice” and “compassionate.” All they’re doing is contributing to the dysfunction of this once pleasant, law-abiding city and laying the burden on tax-paying, law-abiding, responsible, and accountable Torontonians, while giving a pass to the miscreants and felons.
‘No way to run what’s supposed to be a world-class city. ‘Feels like NYC in the ’70s and many Caribbean cities that are falling apart while they cater to the drug trade.
Lovely.
ET, you’ve touched on the great irony of leftism, and indeed, our Charter. One one hand there is subservience to individual emotions, wants, needs, and finally, claims against the state. On the other hand, leftism champions central planning, with Kyoto as one template, where so-called elites decide what is good for individuals.
Then again that is the contradiction of socialism, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, where Marx argues that in order to reach the utopian state of communism, where the government whithers away, we must have an intermediate step of top-down authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Think about it, what socialist state has ever transitioned into true communism.
I know we call the old Soviet Union a communist state, but really they became stuck on socialism. All socialist states eventually become repressive in their thinking and remove, rather than enhance, freedom – they get stuck on socialism; or as Pareto points out, elites will always emerge in human groups, socialism is no different. The temptation to be in charge and benefit from the system is too great and no socialist has ever been able to resist.
Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of authoritarians and totalitarians on the right. At least we know they can never claim to be working towards communal freedom, without government. They’re still bastards, though.
New York City had 539 homicides in 2005 for a population of just of 8M – it’s apparent lowest total since 1963. You can check the FBI website (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_06.html) for this; you don’t have to take my word for it.
However, if you guys want to claim that you “feel” safer in a city with 7 times the homicides but only 3 times the population than Toronto you can go ahead and do that.
But all this crap about “lefties” putting their emotions over their reason sounds a lot like projection to me.
Getting back to the original article, if any of you people actually read the whole, one finds this “forced conversion” to be an ode written by someone with lots of mistakes in his past and present.
In an emergency his wife calls her office rather then him. Her office doesn’t call him either.
He suspects someone has broken into his house that has his *two year old daughter* at 4:30am and how does he respond? By searching his house “half asleep”. What kind of person would remain half asleep with a potential lethal threat to his 2-year daughter? Then he screws up the search and misses the old burglar “hiding behind an open door” trick ever popular with not too bright hide-and-seekers.
If the audience of this blog wants this guy on your side…you can have him.
Observer, I “actually” read the whole article and he is stating exactly what is happening in Britain with its increasing crackdown on any pretence of self-defence by its citizens. The same attitude that leftist governments in Sweden and the Netherlands have fostered make it very likely that if you are attacked there you are on your own. As Anthony has stated this forced reliance on the police to save you has led to a lack of fear of punishment by the criminal so he/she strolls away confident that even if apprehended nothing much will happen. Just like Toronto.
Sounds like you, being a perfect lefty, would upon thinking your house was being robbed, abandon the family, run out to your car and then phone the police and patiently await their arrival sometime in the future.
Notice Anthony identified the same group committing most of the crime that New York and Toronto has and the same reason. New York has more crime because there are more criminals of this group there.
“Don’t have a go at me, you pompous prick. Why should I get involved? It had nothing to do with me.”
Is there any more fitting apotheosis of Thatcher’s dream than that? For indeed it came to pass that Andrew Anthony’s dystopic Britain was given its form and substance in the crucible of Thatcher’s dog-eat-dog conservatism. It was a Britain where the social was disparaged at every turn, and where crass selfishness was extolled, leaving its festering mark. It is no surprise, then, that even today it is a Britain where society exists, all right, but in a critically weakened state. And Anthony’s flailing should, perhaps, be taken as a symptom of just how badly things have gone wrong.
http://drdawgsblawg.blogspot.com/2007/08/upside-down-world.html
There are two kinds of people in the world.
The first are the ones who, when faced with an emergency, MOVE. They stop the fight, put out the fire, save the dog in the river, fire on the enemy, whatever.
The other kind, don’t. They stand frozen, or look away, or even run up and down screaming, but they don’t engage the problem. They don’t move.
The difference between the two I surmise is much more neurological than social. Some people seem wired for action, some for freezing in place.
The first kind of people will never understand the inaction of the second, and feel obliged to kick them into motion. Having needed kicked, the second kind feel humiliated and generally make a fuss after the danger has passed.
This is the natural order of things. I strongly doubt Margaret Thatcher has anything to do with it.
I should add that Liberals generally seem to be Type Two, the freezers. Filled with loud protestations and pronouncements after the fact, but nowhere to be found when it all hits the fan.
Mr. Andrew Anthony is clearly a Type One ass kicker and was bound to discover the error of his ways eventually. Pity it took a terrorist atrocity to wake him the hell up.
I agree with DrDawg that many commentators are rewriting the concetps of left and right.
For one thing, the term “community of communities”, was the rallying call of the Tories in the 1979 election.
Secondly, if the right is so agains the notion of multiculturalism, why does Harper keep his favoured son, Jason Kenny, as Secretary of State of Multiculturalism.
Also, I fail to see why an article that points out the racial nature of violence in a society that has done nothing to integrate outside groups in would be a tough read for the left.