August 24, 2007
If the results of a policy are the opposite of what you want---ramp it up...
Britain's rising levels of gun crime - Telegraph :
The number of young people prosecuted for firearms offences has soared by 20 per cent in the past five years, it was revealed earlier this month.
In 2001, 1,193 youngsters under age 21 went to magistrates courts on gun related charges. By 2005, that had risen to 1,444. The statistics come after a recent wave of gun crime in Britain’s inner cities, with many victims not even out of their teens.
Shadow home affairs minister James Brokenshire said: “The rise in gun crime demonstrated by these figures is alarming.”
In April Bernard Hogan-Howe, the chief constable of Merseyside Police, insisted new laws to make reporting information on shootings and possession of guns a 'duty’’ were essential because people were too scared to come forward....
To me, the important metric is not whether a country or group makes mistakes. Those will happen all the time. What's important to watch is how it recovers when the mistake becomes clear. Does a counter-movement arise? Do people rebel, and say, "Enough is enough?" The soul-destroying sickness of our time is Leftism, and in this country its rise has generated a huge conservative reaction which is attempting to reverse the slide towards evil and eventual death.
So where's the reaction in Britain? There isn't one big enough to notice.
A few minutes ago I read this by Andrea, and wondered briefly if she was being too harsh. Just briefly...
Natalie Solent recounts the story of a woman left alone to give birth (when she had been told it was dangerous to do so) all by herself in a toilet in a hospital, while nurses refused to help. In Britain. She wonders: "How do we get our nerve back?"
The answer is you don't; nerves don't grow back. They're dead, Jim.
My youthful Anglophilia is just about gone and events like these are helping speed it on its way to oblivion. I'm glad I got to go to England when I was just out of high school, before the zombies took over....
My own speculation (it's just armchair theorizin'--there's no clear way to separate cause and effect) is that Newman saw this stuff earlier and more clearly and wisely than anyone else. Just a guess, but he looked into the future (and this was back in the early 1800's!) and saw apostasy, and predicted eventual calamity...
...In a sermon entitled "The Infidelity of the Future," preached in 1873, Newman remarked that: I think that the trials which lie before us are such as would appall and make dizzy even such courageous hearts as St. Athanasius, St. Gregory I or St. Gregory VII. And they would confess that, dark as the prospect of their own day was to them severally, ours has a darkness different in kind from any that has been before it . . . Christianity has never yet had experience of a world simply irreligious. The ancient world of Greece and Rome was full of superstition but not of infidelity, for they believed in the moral governance of the world and their first principles were the same as ours . . . But we are now coming to a time when the world does not acknowledge our first principles...
...In 1877, Newman wrote to a friend of his as follows concerning the future of the Church: As to the prospects of the Church, as to which you ask my opinion . . . my apprehensions are not new but above 50 years standing. I have all that time thought that a time of widespread infidelity was coming, and through all those years the waters have in fact been rising as a deluge. I look for the time, after my life, when only the tops of the mountains will be seen like islands in the waste of waters. I speak principally of the Protestant world—but great actions and successes must be achieved by the Catholic leaders, great wisdom as well as courage must be given them from on high, if Holy Church is to be kept safe from this awful calamity, and, though any trial which came upon her would but be temporary, it may be fierce in the extreme while its lasts... [link]
-- John Henry, Cardinal Newman
"I look for the time, after my life, when only the tops of the mountains will be seen like islands in the waste of waters..."
Posted by John Weidner at August 24, 2007 06:54 AMI think both you and Newman are too pessimistic, John.
In centuries long past, before the advent of science, people lived in a world in which things happened and no one could explain them. The cows have sore udders? Must be displeased barn-spirits. It hasn't rained for many weeks? The anger of the rain-gods must be appeased by the appropriate sacrifices. You have gout? God must be punishing you for something.....
By Newman's time, it was understood that so much that seemed inexplicable did in fact have explanations, even if science hadn't found them yet, and that one day science would find those explanations, and from them men could deduce a way to alleviate or even avert all manner of afflictions and suchlike.
At least, that was the expectation.
Newman lived in a time when that expectation was in full flood, and was sweeping everything before it. No wonder he feared for the future.
And it's that expectation that drives much of Leftist/collectivist/authoritarian/political-Taylorist thought, John. If only the right methods could be found to improve not only humanity's lot but humanity itself, and if those methods were to be applied minutely, uniformly, and ruthlessly, then Heaven-on-Earth would result-- a perfected humanity living in a perfect world.
You and I know that underneath that line of thought lie an arrogance and ignorance which are truly monstrous. No wonder the Soviet Union and its spawn turned out so horribly.
But it's thanks to the various monstrosities of 20th Century Liberalism and Leftism that more and more people are waking up to the fact that science can't really address the fallen state of humanity. Medication and nuturing and proper socialization (at least, as the Leftists would define it-- perpetual helplessness) can't change the fact that we human beings are an ornery and contrary lot that can't be explained by science, that attempts to do so should be taken with a large grain of salt, and that implementation of such "scientific" schemes ought to be rejected. Again, look to the Soviet Union, et al, for object lessons.
Because we have the powerful "bad examples" of the Soviet Union and the rest, the steam-roller of expectations for science has stalled. It finally ran afoul of the large rock called "reality".
We're slow learners, John, but we're getting there. We just have to outlive those "dinosaurs" you write about, whose mental map of the world hasn't changed since 1973.
Posted by: Hale Adams at August 24, 2007 08:20 PM"more and more people are waking up..."
Well, here in the US maybe. Britain, well, that's just what I'm not seeing.
Just saw this quote here. (Good piece on the Surge.)
"There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
-- Will Rogers"
