Read a book a while back called “Life At The Bottom” by a British doctor dealing with those at the low end of the social scale. The dehumanization of them by the government and their social ‘betters’ was staggering to read of. One incident he noted was a high-ranking liberal politician at a dinner who accused him of making up the incidents he wrote of; for after all, the ‘right’ people were in charge and doing the ‘right’ things, so they couldn’t possibly be true, could they? Things couldn’t possibly be going wrong for just those reasons, so he simply refused to see that there was a problem.

For all that is in common in traditions and policy with Britain (or to ultra-narrow, the alliance on Iraq), there’s things like the treatment of crime, self-defense, and guns that the Brits practice that boggle our minds. And we shouldn’t give them a pass on it; if we feel its wrong policy, let’s not just shrug it off as “cultural differences.”

Or barring that, we shouldn’t adopt similar practices here.

I’m not offering much of a solution for my big words, unfortunately. Just a thought from someone up way too late.

We often forget how significant peer group pressure to exemplify the latest “wisdom” really is, but the reason so many subsets of the culture seem so completely out of touch with ordinary people and their real-life concerns is that the subset exists entirely within itself.

Academics publish for other academics, journalists write for the approval of other journalists, tranzis care more for the good opinion of other tranzis than any effective outcome, and, most significantly for an allegedly representative system, political types become captives of their insider group of political activists, and lose contact with the wishes and needs of the general public.

One of the juries I served on sent a 19-year-old on a lengthy all-expenses-paid trip to Huntsville for holding a Tec-9 on women and children. He was available to commit armed robbery in south Dallas because he’d gotten probation for rape three years earlier. Yeah, we do things real different over here. Especially in Texas.

(NB: Never buy your fellow jurors doughnuts. They’ll elect you foreman.)

The increases in violence were counter-balanced by falls in property crime, such as thefts from cars, and fraud.

This is a near iron-clad indicator that people have lost confidence in the justice system. The actual rates of violent crimes against people and non-violent property crimes rise and fall in synch since it is often the same people committing both sets of crimes. What is happening is that victims no longer bother to report minor property crimes because they no longer have any expectation that doing so is worth the hassle. Violent crimes are almost always recorded, usually because the victim is either dead (it’s hard to hide a body) or requires medical care.

America saw this same divergence between the reporting of violent and non-violent crimes during the breakdown of law and order during the 70′s and early 80′s. Fortunately, the American system lets the people actually give the boot elites who can’t accomplish their stated goals. Those who saw crime as intractable problem driven by broad social and economic forces got voted out of office and were replaced by those with a more empirical and pragmatic approach to stopping crime. Now places like New York are among the safest cities in the world instead of the most dangerous.

(1) Social competition between elites is dominating decision making. Elites are making decisions based on how “enlightened” it makes them look to their peers instead of how effective such decisions are in preventing crime. As long as the elites are insulated from the consequences of their decisions, such considerations will dominate their decision making.

(2) Dehumanizing criminals: While many think of themselves as compassionate what they are really doing is dehumanizing criminals by refusing to see them as individual entities capable of making choices and instead viewing them as things pushed around by external forces. In this view, punishing criminals does no good because individual criminals don’t really have the innate human capacity to choose their behaviors in response to punishments.

The model of criminal behavior in (2) combined with (1) leads to a criminal justice system which views itself unable to deal with crime on a practical day-to-day basis and which must instead wait helplessly until a completely just social order is established.