While we're on the subject of abduction by thugs, this. Usual useless social workers, powerless police, waster parents.
There's always been an small underclass - lefties used to call them the lumpenproletariat. But it's been the toxic synergy between the cultural revolution ('if it feels good, do it') and the welfare state which has expanded it so spectacularly.
Trimmed
12 hours ago
5 comments:
Well certainly the underclass was consider part of the lumpenproletariat by the left but it also included rag and bone merchants, swindlers, prostitutes and pimps. Engels included drug dealers, bootleggers and bookmakers.
Some of these would never be considered as part of the underclass.
What's interesting is that the left once regarded these, at best, as being unreliable, and open to reactionary ideas.
Something like this happened in Serbia. An innocent girl was volley ball with her friends when some thugs accosted her, stole her wallet and broke both her arms just for the fun of it.
"Could the problem be the current zeitgeist, recently adopted by just about everyone? The ethics promoted by the state and society today go something like this: Power is its own right. The only right is the right of the strong. The strong are always right - if they demand something, give it to them. Do not fight those stronger than you, no matter the cause or circumstance. Yesterday doesn't matter, tomorrow is far away, the only thing that matters is now. You want something, take it. Take it today.
How can we expect the youth of today to obey any sort of moral code, when the state itself rejects it altogether? Why should anyone want to submit to humiliation in a country that keeps being humiliated? Why not play by the state's rules? There are two players in that game: the strong, thuggish one that can take anything he wants with impunity; and the weak, pathetic, incompetent victim who accepts the beatings, approves of them, and continues to crave the companionship of the strong, no matter how hard the beatings get."
"..."Thankfully these are rare cases but it is right that Doncaster Safeguarding Children's Board is undertaking a serious case review to see what lessons must be learned."..."
Well, that'll fix everything...
Laban,
I agree with you in part, certainly about the cultural revolution, the systematic deconstruction of the national moral code in order to let the aristocracy engage in guilt-free fornication, or whatever else the vice du jour might be, in public rather than in private; but I would have to question whether the welfare state bears the same degree of guilt. With nature abhorring a vacuum and all, it's hard to see how the welfare state would have expanded had places like this not been to all intents and purposes destroyed by decades of economic ideology which made the expansion of the welfare state necessary for survival.
The cultural revolution was two things. A growth in tolerance for various behaviours that had been penalised before, and the change to a post modernist philosophy that attempted to rehabilitate Marxism through relativism.
Alan Turing was a homosexual, who was penalised for his conduct. That was wrong and I see no defence for this. That society has changed to tolerate Alan Turing's homosexuality is to the good.
However society has also gone beyond to a point where no negative comments about homosexuals are to be tolerated in the public space and that change is to the bad.
As to the welfare state. Leftists in the pre-war era and arguably up to the 1970s recognised the morally destructive nature of welfare but regarded it as a necessity to avoid absolute destitution. The word lumpenproletariat captures that attitude. In the 1950s people thought you qualified for a council house because you had been on the waiting list for so long, you got unemployment benefit or received medical care because you had contributed to NI. Today the attitude is that you have a right that overrides any failure to contribute.
By the 1980s long term unemployment became a legitimate mode of living. The TV series Shelley would not have been possible in the 1950s.
Today we live in era where it is perfectly legitimate to complain about the behaviour of the lumpenproletariat provided you blame it on relative poverty but never legitimate if you blame it on the demoralising effects of being dependent on welfare.
The question should be: has the welfare state caused the change in attitude to welfare dependency or was that a change caused by the cultural revolution?
My view is that the denial of the link between personal responsibility and outcomes is fuelled by both.
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