Tag Archives: Family

Commentary

Why are youth rioting in the UK’s socialist welfare state?

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If the UK is so secular and socialist, then why are young people rioting? Don’t young people like secularism and socialism? I thought that the enlightened Labour Party would have fixed all the problems of society with their progressive fiscal and social policies over the last decade.

This National Post article explains what the rioting youth said of their exploits.

Excerpt:

It is the joy on display that is so unsettling.

People who are protesting are by nature angry, or at least solemn. They have upraised fists and homemade signs.

But young Britons haven’t even bothered to come up with a slogan or a decent chant. They are blissfully happy as they destroy other people’s property. They are without guilt.

It can be seen in the images of giddy youths hauling flat-screen televisions out of plundered shops. It can be read in the reports where, as one witness described, a young woman looted so many sweaters from a high-end London store she tottered under their weight.

And it can be heard, starkly, in the conversation between a BBC Radio reporter and two women in Croydon who were, at 9: 30 a.m. Tuesday, drinking from a bottle of stolen rosé and talking about their night of adventure.

“Everyone was chucking things, chucking bottles, breaking into stuff,” one said.

“It was good, though; it was madness,” her friend chimed in, giggling about the craziness of it all. The first girl agreed, it was “good fun.”

The reporter asked if they had been drinking all night. “Free alcohol,” one said. Then she caught herself. “It’s the government’s fault, though. The Conservatives. It’s not even a riot. It’s showing the police we can do what we want.”

The reporter gamely tried to crack through the cognitive dissonance she was hearing. These are local people whose shops are being torched, she said. “Why are you targeting your own people?”

“It’s the rich people,” came the explanation. “It’s the people who have all got businesses. That’s why all this is happening, because of the rich people.”

Tell that to the kid, captured on video, who was sitting on the ground with a bleeding nose when someone came to his aid. He was helped up, then had his backpack emptied.

Tell that to the shop owners whose only asset was their inventory and who have lost it all to self-centred, marauding thugs. If only they had known they were “rich,” they might have taken time to enjoy their vast wealth. Instead of, you know, working.

[…]They have convinced themselves someone else is to blame, even if they identify a different culprit in consecutive breaths, and therefore they are off to pillage, loot and burn. If homes are lost to the fires? Blame the rich. Or the police. They started it all, you see.

Does that view sound familiar? Why yes – it’s the view of mainstream Democrats, including Obama and his allies in the news media.

And here’s an article that Mary and Dina sent to me explaining where these amoral children came from.

Excerpt:

An underclass has existed throughout history, which once endured appalling privation. Its spasmodic outbreaks of violence, especially in the early 19th century, frightened the ruling classes.

Its frustrations and passions were kept at bay by force and draconian legal sanctions, foremost among them capital punishment and transportation to the colonies.

Today, those at the bottom of society behave no better than their forebears, but the welfare state has relieved them from hunger and real want.

When social surveys speak of “deprivation” and “poverty”, this is entirely relative. Meanwhile, sanctions for wrongdoing have largely vanished.

[…]But it will not do for a moment to claim the rioters’ behaviour reflects deprived circumstances or police persecution.

Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.

This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect.

It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion which modern society finds unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything different or better.

A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.

Anyone who reproaches a child, far less an adult, for discarding rubbish, making a racket, committing vandalism or driving unsociably will receive in return a torrent of obscenities, if not violence.

So who is to blame? The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass.

The social engineering industry unites to claim that the conventional template of family life is no longer valid.

[…]This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.

The judiciary colludes with social services and infinitely ingenious lawyers to assert the primacy of the rights of the criminal and aggressor over those of law-abiding citizens, especially if a young offender is involved.

The police, in recent years, have developed a reputation for ignoring yobbery and bullying, or even for taking the yobs’ side against complainants.

“The problem,” said Bill Pitt, the former head of Manchester’s Nuisance Strategy Unit, “is that the law appears to be there to protect the rights of the perpetrator, and does not support the victim.”

Police regularly arrest householders who are deemed to have taken “disproportionate” action to protect themselves and their property from burglars or intruders. The message goes out that criminals have little to fear from “the feds”.

Figures published earlier this month show that a majority of “lesser” crimes – which include burglary and car theft, and which cause acute distress to their victims – are never investigated, because forces think it so unlikely they will catch the perpetrators.

[…]A teacher, Francis Gilbert, wrote five years ago in his book Yob Nation: “The public feels it no longer has the right to interfere.”

Discussing the difficulties of imposing sanctions for misbehaviour or idleness at school, he described the case of a girl pupil he scolded for missing all her homework deadlines.

The youngster’s mother, a social worker, telephoned him and said: “Threatening to throw my daughter off the A-level course because she hasn’t done some work is tantamount to psychological abuse, and there is legislation which prevents these sorts of threats.

“I believe you are trying to harm my child’s mental well-being, and may well take steps… if you are not careful.”

That story rings horribly true. It reflects a society in which teachers have been deprived of their traditional right to arbitrate pupils’ behaviour. Denied power, most find it hard to sustain respect, never mind control.

I think that last example explains the root of the problem.

Here’s the chain of causation. First, people get annoyed with the talk of moral values and moral duties that comes from religious people. They don’t want anyone telling them to set boundaries on their pursuit of pleasure.

Agnostic evolutionist Aldous Huxley explains:

I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.

The secular left government is only too happy to push this philosophy of meaninglessness in the public schools. It makes the secular left elites feel good when they undermine the moral standard that religious people use when making judgments. Judgments are bad because they make bad people feel bad about behaving badly. Judgments have to go. And if religion is the ground for moral judgments, then religion has to go. And the public schools can be used to make sure that it does go.

This new view of morality is called “moral relativism”, and it is the official view of the secular left. Basically, if there is no designer of the universe, then there is no way we ought to be. If there is no way we ought to be, then no one has a right to tell anyone how they ought to be. This is the view that the Labour Party enshrined into law, using all the power of the public schools and the state-run media. The position of the secular left is that making people feel bad by judging them is the only real evil left in the world. Just let people do whatever they want, they say – we can always tax the rich and the corporations more to make everyone come out equal in the end.

You may have noticed that my post about Theodore Dalrymple’s book “Life at the Bottom” is back in the top 10 popular posts today. Check out the post – it has links to all the chapters of a free book that explains exactly what the rioters believe, and why. The thesis of the book is that the secular left elites deliberately cause the poor to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, and to prevent anyone from holding them accountable for their own choices. It’s a must-read.

Commentary

Is redistribution of wealth a substitute for marriage and family?

2 Comments

From MercatorNet. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The circumstances of the half-million indigenous people of Australia are quite varied, from integration in capital cities to isolated outback townships where people barely speak English. But they are united in being disadvantaged. Life expectancy for Aboriginal men and women is about 10 years less than non-indigenous Australians. Other indices of social welfare – employment, education, housing, infant mortality – are appalling. It would paint a rosy picture to describe some Aboriginal settlements as Third World. They are Fourth World camps with unimaginable levels of squalor, domestic violence, child sex abuse, drunkenness, and drug abuse.

[…]…over the past 40 years, the conditions of indigenous people, relative to the rest of Australia, have hardly changed. Not that the government has been sitting on its hands. In fact, as a scathing review of the effectiveness of its programmes showed this week, it has been busy spending money hand over fist — A$3.5 billion a year for many years. And, says the report, these billions have “yielded dismally poor returns to date”.

“The history of Commonwealth policy for Indigenous Australians over the past 40 years is largely a story of good intentions, flawed policies, unrealistic assumptions, poor implementation, unintended consequences and dashed hopes. Strong policy commitments and large investments of government funding have too often produced outcomes which have been disappointing at best and appalling at worst.”

How to raise the standard of living of indigenous people is bitterly disputed. This vast and intractable morass has defeated generations of government bureaucrats, both white and indigenous. Unhappily, as the report acknowledges, “good intentions in Indigenous affairs do not translate easily into good policy, and … the risk of unintended consequences in this domain is often extremely high.”

There is one promising approach on the table – to abandon the welfare mentality to which so many Aborigines are addicted. Some Aboriginal leaders, like Noel Pearson and Galarrwuy Yunupingu are trying to convince their people and the Federal and state governments that less sit-down money is needed, not more. They argue forcefully that welfare is a poison which is killing their people.

[…]But both governments and these impressive leaders have failed to address a central issue– the state of the Aboriginal family. For decades, the government has tried to give its indigenous citizens everything they needed to access the benefits of a developed economy: education, housing, health care and so on. But it withholds the pincode, which is the traditional Western family.

All the indices for Aboriginal families are dire. About 70 percent of indigenous mothers have never been married. The vast majority of children are born out of wedlock. If Aboriginal families are dysfunctional, is it any wonder that literacy levels are in the basement and drug and alcohol abuse is sky-high?

For the bureaucrats, the figures for indigenous marriage are far less important than those for literacy or health. There are probably two reasons for this. For one, they are loath to criticise customary marriage — even though it includes polygamy and child brides – lest they appear paternalistic and patronising. But the main reason must surely be that marriage is not important for them either. The high rates of divorce, co-habitation, and single-motherhood in white Australia do not trouble them.

[…]If Aborigines had strong families, their child mortality rates and maternal mortality rates would not be the same as East Timor or the Solomon Islands.

What is happening, effectively, is we are shutting Aboriginals out of Australian society by refusing to promote the most powerful social technology of all: the traditional nuclear family. Families teach orderliness, self-restraint, industriousness, ambition, respect for others’ rights – all the virtues that children need to be healthy, to take advantage of their education and to succeed in working life.

The reason why left-wing bureaucrats are opposed to strengthening marriage is because they don’t like the differing gender roles that are inherent in marriage, they don’t like chastity and sexual restraint, and they don’t like people having the ability to make a living independent of the state. If there was no “crisis” to solve, then how could the compassionate left get elected? How could they feel good about themselves by redistributing other people’s wealth and imposing their enlightened values on the poor? They need to create the crisis – they don’t want to solve it. Subsidizing risky and reckless behavior just throws gasoline on the fire – which is exactly what the left wants. They don’t like religion. They don’t like morality. They don’t think that people should feel bad about being immoral. They don’t care about encouraging people to be careful about conceiving and raising children. They care about getting elected and being perceived as generous. And they will only be stopped when people see that redistributing wealth is not as good as helping the poor to make their own way in the world – to earn their own success, independent of the state’s social programs.

We need to realize that the secular left elites are not wise, and they are not good. They do not have a plan to do good, they do what makes them feel good. They are not helping the poor, they are helping themselves. Undermining religion and morality while favoring dependence on government does not help the poor.

News

Do children make marriages more stable or more happy?

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A new study sheds light on how the presence of children affects marital stability and happiness. (H/T Reformed Seth)

Excerpt:

[…][C]hildfree couples divorce more often than couples who have at least one child, according to researchers, despite numerous studies that indicate marital happiness plummets in the first year or two after the birth of a child and sometimes never quite recoups.

Among the research author Po Bronson gathered for his various books, he notes the work done by sociologist Paul H. Jacobson as proof:

“For couples without children, the divorce rate in 1948 was 15.3 per 1,000. Where one child was present, the estimate rate was 11.6 per 1,000. The figure thus continues to decrease, and in families with four or more children, it was 4.6. Altogether, the rate for couples with children was 8.8 per 1,000. In other words, the rate for childless couples was almost double the rate for families with children.”

OK, but Jacobson’s study was published in 1950; is it still true today?

Yes, according to journalist Anneli Rufus, whose number crunching discovered that of the divorced couples in the United States, 66 percent are childless compared with 40 percent who have kids. Why? Evidently, the “absence of children leads to loneliness and weariness.”

[…]So if they’re so happy, why do more kidfree couples end up splitting?

“People assume children are the glue that holds a marriage together, which really isn’t true. Kids are huge stressors,” says Scott, head of the Childless by Choice Project whose documentary on childfree couples was just released. “Despite that, there is a strong motive to stay together. The childfree don’t have that motive so there’s no reason to stay together if it’s not working.” That’s why for Wilde, who says her relationship became too much work and “I don’t think love should be work,” it wasn’t too hard to kiss her prince goodbye.

The article is from an extremely liberal web site, which explains why they are quoting all of these anti-child web sites. There is some sort of doomsday overpopulation myth that people on the left often believe in, against all the evidence. It’s really just selfishness, though.

I think that one of the reasons why childless couples divorce more is because people tend to stay together for the children and try to work it out.