A worldwide phenomena?

In Dalrymple musings on the London riots this passage seems to ring rather true about our current generation in general. A philosophical position which has somewhat dire consequences for future potential outbreaks...think even of the current 'occupy' political trends and the people and ideology's behind them.

One rioter told a journalist that his compatriots were fed up with being broke all the time and that he knew people who had absolutely nothing. It is worth pondering what lies behind these words. It is obvious that the rioter considered being broke not merely unpleasant, as we all would, but unjust and anomalous, for it was these qualities that justified the rioting in his mind and led him to suggest that the riots were restitution. Leave aside the Micawberish point that one can be broke on any income whatever if one’s desires fail to align with one’s financial possibilities; it is again obvious that the rioter believed that he had a right not to be broke and that this right was being violated. When he said that he knew people with “nothing,” he did not mean that he knew homeless, starving people left on the street without clothes to wear or shoes on their feet; none of the rioters was like this, and many looked only too fit for law-abiding citizens’ comfort. Nor did he mean people without hot and cold running water, electricity, a television, a cell phone, health care, and access to schooling. People had a right to such things, and yet they could have them all and still have “nothing,” in his meaning of the word. Somehow, people had a right to something beyond this irreducible “nothing” because this “nothing” was a justification for rioting. So people have a right to more than they have a right to; in other words, they have a right to everything.

Wow, the implications are indeed scary yet scarily true given today's news.

A journalistic bard.

Whilst there are aspects of Theodore Dalrymple's worldview that I cannot agree with, his elucidation of current affairs and the terminology he employs in that regard, leaves me filled with wonderment at the richness of the English language.
I also appreciate his way of looking at current events, it betrays I think, a romantic (though life scarred) cynical, aesthetes perspective...perhaps I can even identify with certain aspects of it?
His writing embodies descriptive excellence and penetrating prescience in the deployment of sometimes pedestrian information:

Apart from the empirical unlikelihood of the Ping-Pong tables’ exerting the hoped-for prophylactic effect, the theory suggests that it is government’s duty not merely to keep the peace but to keep the population happy and amused. It is hardly surprising, then, that when people claim that service reductions provoked the riots, they are unable to see that if this were so, the problem would be not the removal of services, but dependence on them in the first place.

Right on!

Ask not for whom the (marriage?) bell tolls,...

Michael Cook provides some food for thought:

...the reason why same-sex marriage has become conceivable is that the prestige of heterosexual marriage has sunk so low that anyone can take it on. As Amanda Vanstone, a former minister in the Liberal (conservative) Howard government put it, “It is not convincing. It is a triumph of hope over reality. Marriage long ago stopped being to the exclusion of all others and for life. If we don't care about those two elements being disregarded by so many, why should we care about the ‘between a man and a woman’ part?”

In other words, the currency has become so debased that paupers can pretend they are millionaires. It’s all just make-believe.

What gays and lesbians want is marriage lite, not real marriage. This confers the right to do karaoke versions of  “Going to the Chapel of Love” in public, but little more. Divorce is an ever-present possibility, fidelity is unnecessary and children are optional. Big deal.

What compelling reason is there for the state to support such an impoverished institution? Traditional marriages nurture children, who are the future of society and deserve protection. But why should the state get in the business of supporting what is little more than friendship with benefits?

Marriage is in a terrible state in our society. More and more couples are cohabiting; nearly half of all marriages end in divorce; children are treated as optional extras; extra-marital affairs are common; pornography is a scourge.

The absurdity is that gays and lesbians don’t regard this as a disaster at all. In their eyes these are precisely the conditions which make same-sex marriage an attractive option.

And so our culture drifts a little closer to the whirlpool at the centre of the 'gurgler'.

The new reality

The Stephen Conroy debacle in Parliament illustrates how emotionalism triumphs over reason in today's politics. This is the PoMo philosophy of 'caring' writ large, where it is more important to be seen to be caring than to actually be caring.
This wearing of your heart on your sleeve gained its apotheosis during the Princess Diana's death debacle where the Queen had to show her mourning to the crowds in order to be accepted as truly mourning.
No more of that stiff upper lip nonsense in this new 'caring' age, we need to be metro-sexual, green, soft, and pliable.
Just like the  mujahidin camped outside our front gates; I don't think!

It’s the Case of Conroy’s Curious Tears - and how tragically easy it is to become an overnight hero of the Left. Stephen Conroy is the Communications Minister, disliked by Labor’s Left for being a faction boss of the Right. So it astonished many to see Conroy cry at Labor’s national conference on Sunday. Even wilder, he cried as he spoke against Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s plan to sell our uranium to India.
Gillard has reason on her side, of course. India is a democracy and an ally. Our uranium would be used only for electricity generation in a country very short of the stuff.
Anyway, we already sell uranium to China, which is not a democracy and, unlike India, has helped ugly regimes develop nuclear weapons.
Then there’s the jobs we’d create, the cash we’d earn and the friendship with India we’d repair. It’s a no brainer. So what on earth was Conroy’s argument against it all?

Stand by: He’d had an uncle who’d worked at Windscale, a nuclear reactor in Britain which in 1957 - six years before Conroy’s birth - had a fire.

Here’s how Conroy put it. His now-retired uncle was “involved in all the cover-ups” of the Windscale fire. which released Iodine-131 into the atmosphere. “My family remembers when they came and took away all the milk for months because you couldn’t drink it,” an emotional Conroy declared. His cousins and another uncle still worked in the nuclear industry and his uncle had said: “If you’ve got a choice, don’t be in it.” For this rationalisation of unreason, Conroy got a standing ovation and was dubbed a “Left wing idol”, which shows how much the Left prefers tears to thought, fantasy to fact. Scary.

First, a question. If Conroy’s family thinks the nuclear industry is so horrific, why do some of them still work in it, more than 50 years after Windscale? Why is it OK for them to earn a buck from nuclear, but not OK for Australia?

Behind the mask!

So true...LOL, Michael Durkin nails it again:

Now consider the intellectual.  He has graduated, proudly, with a degree in French literature, or a PhD in the breeding habits of butterflies.  He regards himself as socially superior to a plumber but, to his horror, when he tries to enter the labour market, he discovers there is little or no demand for experts in Baudelaire, or for lepidopterists.  Perhaps he tries to obtain a poorly paid position at a university, to continue his ‘work’.  Even if he lands such as position he struggles to maintain a middle class lifestyle on the paltry wages.   Does he retrain as a plumber (since demand for plumbers is high)?   God forbid.  The very thought! 

Ludwig von Mises says of the intellectual, ‘As a “worker by brain” he looks arrogantly down upon the manual worker whose hands are calloused and soiled.  It makes him furious to notice that so many of these manual workers get higher pay and are more respected than he himself.  What a shame he thinks, that capitalism fondles the simple drudgery of the “uneducated” and does not appraise his “intellectual” work according to its “true” value.

This mentality is what is behind the 'new class':

The intellectuals believe there is a nobility in public service which is not to be found in the vulgar market place.  Happily for them, with the expansion of the State in the 20^th Century the number of these State-funded jobs has swollen enormously.  J.K Galbraith (among others) called this burgeoning State-sponsored intelligentsia the ‘New Class’.

These are the bureaucrats, the feeders at the public trough, the parasites who hate 'capitalism' because they can't compete in the market:

The poorly paid intellectual, says Mises, ‘must swallow down his mortification and divert his wrath toward a vicarious target.  He indicts society’s economic organisation, the nefarious system of capitalism.  But for this unfair regime his abilities and talents, his zeal and his achievements would have brought him the rich reward they deserve.’    Of the intelligentsia, he says, ‘They sublimate their hatred into philosophy, the philosophy of anti-capitalism, in order to render inaudible the inner voice that tells them their failure is entirely their own fault.’   Schumpeter too describes the ‘hostility of the intellectual group – amounting to moral disapproval of the capitalist order.’ 

...these are the ones who want us to give them our taxes and they want to rule because they know best, they are the 'intellectuals', they are the ones who care!

As Vaclav Klaus so presciently says the Global warming scare is not about greening the planet its really about who wants to be in charge.

The market is based on merit.  Success is determined by how highly people value what you have to sell.  The intellectuals, whose talents are not highly valued, yearn for a society based on status.  This is why the Green intelligentsia fetishise hierarchical pre-capitalist society.  This kind of society, they assert, was more ‘natural’ and ‘ordered’ and ‘harmonious’.

Today, the bulk of intellectuals in the ‘New Class’ work directly or indirectly for the State.  They are paid out of taxes levied on the productive economy.  In other words, the plumbers (and bricklayers and lorry drivers and estate agents) are forced to pay for them.  No wonder the plumbers do not turn up at Green demonstrations to demand higher taxes and more state control. 

Woe to the reasonable!

To all those who believe that the world is a better place and that we are happily 'evolving' ever onwards and upwards; I invite them to remove their brains from their #*!es. This world is not improving! We are in the midst of a civilisational collapse and the sooner you wake up to that reality the better.
Melanie Phillips is one of the few journos who write about what is actually happening rather than what should be, or would like to be, or what could if only...the dreams of Utopianists who actually do not believe the evidence of their own eyes.
Colour them Green or perhaps more accurately, Red!

This attack followed hard on the heels of a story about a teenage burglar who, asked to write a letter of apology to his victims, wrote instead that he wasn’t bothered or sorry at all, and that the burglary was all their fault for leaving their window open.

Such incidents suggest that we are dealing with something beyond merely ruthless acquisitiveness and contempt for the law. They suggest a total absence of empathy for another person, which is the basic requirement of morality and, in turn, of a civilised society. They illustrate a brutalisation of humanity.

Evidence of this sickening tendency has been accumulating for years. While violent crime has always been with us, elements of sadism, cruelty or total indifference to anyone else’s distress are becoming frighteningly commonplace.

To some of us, it has long seemed obvious that this is intimately related to the breakdown of religious belief. It is the morality embedded in the Bible that expressly requires us to put the interests of others first.

C.S. Lewis wrote of the tendency within modern ideologues to: "geld the stallion then  bid him procreate", or words to that effect. Essentially that 'contemporary thinkers' (an oxymoron if ever) desired the very thing that they denied, i.e. evidence of a self-delusional hypocrisy, mass schizophrenia perhaps?

Paradox is the essence of being human: believing one thing should be done and doing something else, instead, or thinking in an honest way one moment and not, the next. Self-deception is an essential tool for self-advancement. It is most developed in the most intellectual.

Think of the high priests of the AGW movement and how they preach about rising oceans then buy mansions on the seashore, or Obama who gives speeches about cutting back on excessive petrol consumption then jumps into his convoy of SUV's and onto the next bully pulpit. It just doesn't make any sense unless you realise that these folk do not believe that ordinary restrictions apply to them...they are after all, the elite, the new mandarins, the rulers, the ones who deserve to be in charge, the aristocratic class, the Carers!

Klein cares. Gore cares. Hansen and Suzuki care. Or, at least, appear to do so: the perception of caring is actually more important than actual caring. The actual caring by deed can be carried out by underlings as long as the overlings have set the parameters for caring right. Which she and the others know how to do. Tough love is for harsh people; martyrdom for one’s cause is better, if unfortunate, when feelings, rather than reason, guide your life. Klein et al want to be remembered for what they stood for; little people want to be remembered for what they do, in comparison.

Prophetic insight

The sleep of reason produces monsters:

What the west refused to grasp was that there was never any chance of the Iranian regime seeing sense. That’s because what drives its dominant members at least is not conventional political impulse but an apocalyptic messianism. That means they actively seek to bring about a conflagration -- even if this consumes much of Iran -- since they believe that this apocalypse will prompt the return to earth of a religious messiah figure. They actually want to bring about the end of the world. But the west just didn’t take any of this remotely seriously.