No, Wait, Hear Me Out
Lifted from the comments, an idea for late-night viewing. First, some context is in order, but do let me know what you think.
It began with some rumblings on common progressive attitudes regarding crime and recidivism. Not least a practised unrealism and the failure to acknowledge just how different the mental landscape of the criminal demographic can be:
Among which, these.
And it occurs to me that people in high-status professions, including legal professions, are more likely to have internalised high-status opinions, mouthed as a kind of social jewellery. According to which, the creatures treating us as mere prey – suckers from whom things can be taken – are the ones most deserving of our sympathy and indulgence.
Pretentious sympathy, of course. But still.
Such views passing entirely unchallenged in the inevitable, rather fawning Guardian profile. A profile in which Mr Stafford Smith chides and insults the victims of burglary, and the law-abiding generally, while offering excuses for those who break into strangers’ homes and steal their belongings, and who do this over and over again.
Mr Stafford Smith goes on to boast that he dislikes Conservative voters much more than criminals, and Ms Decca Aitkenhead, his Guardian interviewer, claps along approvingly. As if rhetorically minimising crime and its effects – say, on the elderly who find their homes violated and stripped of any valuables – were somehow a credential, proof of their own elevation. There’s a weirdly demented quality, one that’s not acknowledged as much as it should be.
At which point, I was reminded of the Guardian‘s own Zoe Williams, who scolds those who would rather not live next door to thieving, feral neighbours – say, the kinds of creatures who blast out loud music at 3am, and who hurl pets from upstairs windows:
Presumably Ms Williams’ own neighbours have little in common with, say, the delightful Stuart Murgatroyd, a father of twelve who has never worked and boasts an extensive criminal record, not least for robbing the elderly in graveyards, and whose attempt to challenge an Anti Social Behaviour Order was cut short at the very last minute due to him being arrested for assaulting the mother of his children, herself a convicted getaway driver, on the steps of the courthouse.
And I suspect our infinitely compassionate Ms Williams has yet to experience an all-night, full-on, eleven-hour rave being hosted next door, which would doubtless give her an opportunity to practise that non-judgmental piety.
As I can tell you’re curious, here’s Mr Murgatroyd with three of his twelve children. Everyone in the photo has been subject to Antisocial Behaviour Orders for repeatedly terrorising their neighbours.
Here’s Mr Murgatroyd exchanging views with the mother of his children:
So, with the above in mind, here’s the pitch.
Imagine, if you will, a reality TV show of perhaps a dozen episodes, in which, having been banished from their current council-house digs, the Murgatroyds move in next door to Zoe Williams, our Guardian columnist and champion of the downtrodden – albeit, until now, from a safe distance. Would we be treated to heart-warming chats across the garden fence, and exchanged cups of sugar, while the families’ respective children – Zoe’s are named Thurston and Harper – have jolly times together?
As a real-world test of Zoe’s scrupulously progressive worldview, one shared widely by her peers, it would, I think, make for instructive viewing.
And as svh suggests in the comments, “She deserves no less.”
Update, via the comments:
Picturing the scenario above – Zoe Meets The Murgatroyds – does rather reveal the absurdity of her pretence. But this pretence is far from uncommon among professed egalitarians. It’s a fantasy world, quite laughable in its dishonesty. Unless we’re to believe that Zoe, dear caring Zoe, would be thrilled to have violent morons moving in next door to her.
And yet she and her colleagues tell us that any effort to remove such ‘problem families’ or to inhibit their malevolence – so that their neighbours might have some semblance of a normal life – is “dehumanising,” a “demonization of the poor,” and is merely “trying to shunt people out of society for not being rich enough.” As if the victims of the Murgatroyd family, and any number of others just like them, weren’t people whose resources were also modest. As if the law-abiding targets of their sociopathy weren’t almost always working class.
Again,
But such is Zoe’s concern for the common man.
And do note the conspicuous flattening of values, the equalising of victims and victimiser, the quite literal demoralisation.
Apparently, we shouldn’t register any meaningful difference between that nice Mrs Wilson, who doesn’t have much but is always friendly and obliging, and the laughing ferals who trashed her tiny flat, nicked her pension, and pissed all over her carpets and furniture.
And they call this being progressive.
Guardian columnists, and progressives in general, don’t seem particularly interested in the functional working class. Their greatest enthusiasm, and their most ambitious contrivance, seems reserved for the feckless and dysfunctional, the pathologically selfish, the incorrigibly criminal. That’s when we get displays of what amounts to a perverse art form.
Part of the reason, I suspect, is that there’s little in-group status to be had in pretending to care about functional people of modest means. Instead, they pretend to care about more exotic demographics. And so, among progressives, we get pretentious compassion for unrepentant and habitual thieves, habitual burglars, habitually criminal drivers. Because needlessly endangering the lives of others is now a basis for excuses, sympathy, and applause.
Oh, and dog thieves and armed muggers. Obviously.
And once you register this pattern, this weird convolution, it does seem to crop up quite a lot.
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Would definitely watch.
There is nothing progressive about “progressive” politics. The term was invented by the left for propaganda purposes, and we should aggressively reject it in favor of terms which are more accurate and which reflect the true nature of leftism.
And it would have to be filmed over, ooh, several months.
Just realised I can edit posts and correct typos on my phone.
#PersonalGrowth
Hehe. That.
Well, if someone’s view of crime and antisocial behaviour is informed only by abstractions – convenient abstractions – they’re not getting the full picture, or anything like the full picture.
Some immediacy and vividness would, I think, correct that.
So can we still there you out?
[walks over to correction booth for regrooving]
[ Unchains bad-tempered dog. ]
Can we do it with lenient judges?
It’s a versatile format.
Can’t believe I’m here, toiling, on a Sunday.
I should get overtime.
Four quid at Tesco.
Oh, you said “overtime”.
[ Agitates bad-tempered dog. ]
.
As far as beverages go I think we’ve driven him to drink.
Repeated exposure to immediacy and vividness might be required: Remember New York judge “Turn em loose” Bruce M Wright, who retained his “be kind to black thugs” policy even after he was mugged into the hospital. Also remember all the Russian communists murdered by Stalin who nonetheless remained fervent commies until the moment the bullets entered their brains.
When you’ve viewed the real world through glass as some sort of diorama, surely you’re deserving of a Night in the Museum.
Liberals cannot see behavior likely to get one shot by the police. Cannot say for sure how to apportion the root causes among “low IQ”, “built in personality defects”, “born in a shitty hood rat subculture”, and “indoctrinated by the left into paranoid entitlement”.
Well, picturing the scenario above – Zoe and her new neighbours, the Murgatroyds – does rather reveal the absurdity of her pretence. But this pretence is far from uncommon among her peers. It’s a fantasy world, quite laughable in its dishonesty. Unless, we’re to believe that Zoe, dear caring Zoe, would be thrilled to have violent ferals moving in next door to her.
And yet she and her peers tell us, quite often, that any effort to remove such ‘problem families’ or to inhibit their malevolence – so that their neighbours might have some semblance of a normal life – is “dehumanising,” a “demonization of the poor,” and is merely “trying to shunt people out of society for not being rich enough.” As if the victims of the Murgatroyd family, and any number of others just like them, weren’t people whose resources were also modest. As if the law-abiding targets of their sociopathy weren’t working class too.
Again,
So much for Zoe’s professed concern for the common man.
People who torture pets and mug old women in graveyards are dehumanizing themselves.
I’m forced to ask, why would you expose the poor Murgatroyd clan to such a thing? They’re only common criminals, do they really deserve that?
[ Slides bowl of ostensibly toenail-free peanuts to Rafi. ]
If you need more names that the criminals can move next door to, I think that we’re all willing to help.
A demonization of demons.
But no surprise that the left would shield demons, as leftism is deeply satanic.
Just how long has that bowl been sitting there?
OT
I am a parent and thought this was hilarious:
https://x.com/i/status/1832488448369795330
Pitch it. Or at least post it on the twitters, namechecking Zoe Williams et al.
Just one point of contention… the feral are in no way, shape or form ‘working class’. I and my family are working class. These talking chimpanzees are… parasitical.
The term is a bit of a stretch for Mr Murgatroyd, for whom lawful employment seems anathema. But this distinction – between people of modest means and the verminous creatures that live among them, often preying on them – has long offended Ms Williams and many of her colleagues. She famously denounced use of the word chav, along with other epithets used – not least by working-class people – to differentiate the respectable from those undeserving of respect.
It’s quite interesting, just how much effort Guardian columnists have expended over the years in attempts to rob working-class people of ways to distinguish themselves from the nakedly verminous.
Zoe claimed that chav is always used as a synonym for “poor person,” someone “not having a lot of money.” But when I’ve heard the term, it’s generally been used by people of modest means who don’t care to be grouped with antisocial morons. Not so much a comment on economic status as a dislike of a certain kind of ugly, aggressive attitude. Two-fingers-to-you-and-fag-smoke-in-the-baby’s-face, as I once put it.
Or council-housing-and-violent, as one commenter quipped.
Much like ‘trash’ in the American South – it describes behaviour and attitude, not wherewithal.
Ms Williams also informed us that hoodie is a “sinister” racial code-word, used only to indicate “a group of young black guys.”
Some years ago, I was told that some shops had a “no hoodies” policy, on the basis that they’ve been used to hide a person’s identity – i.e. while shoplifting. Presumably, Zoe would regard that as a “sleight-of-hand” for a no coloureds policy.
UK slang: worker vs earner. A worker is a worker. An earner is a welfare parasite. Have I got that right, David?
A story, purported to be true, concerned a bar in the US South near a college where the college kids, wearing ball caps, got in fights with the locals, wearing cowboy hats. They could not say “no college kids” so the brilliant owners put a sign “no hats”. The fights stopped.
The empathy for the downtrodden leads to support systems such as welfare and gov housing. Unfortunately, it becomes too generous such that the Murgatroids among us never have to work. Even worse, any bimbo who gets pregnant gets a check but only if no husband is there, thus breaking the family. Compassion carried too far is pernicious.
Hoodie as in hood, a shortening of neighborhood. Hood rats.
Yes. As I said in a recent comment:
And they call this being progressive.
But of course.
Related: We are starting to see signs of a crackdown on people wearing masks in public, for the same reason. Liberals and libertarians have lectured me for decades that this is an infringement on the civil rights of the poor downtrodden hood rats. They have also insisted that it is an infringement to require Muslim women to un-veil themselves for drivers license photos. Some of these liberals and libertarians presumably had IQ’s in the 140 range based on their STEM careers.
LOL. Were the fights instigated by arrogant college kids despising townies, or locals who resented college kids?
I can’t speak for the nation. Though I’ve often heard working-class people airing disapproval of those who seem to exist entirely, and indefinitely, at others’ expense, and whose capacity for gratitude is effectively zero. And again, Guardian columnists don’t seem particularly interested in the functional working class. Much less so than the feckless and dysfunctional, even the habitually criminal.
Then the gushing ensues.
Clarification: “earner” is a term used proudly by the welfare parasites. Or by thieves–on reflection I’m not sure.
You are endangering your oracular reputation.
On reflection, oracles were notorious for giving ambiguous answers. And they tended to get their “powers” from volcanic fumes and hallucinogenic herbs.
So far David has only admitted to gin and tonics.
Direct genetic evidence for ethnic differences in aggressiveness
A tragic story about a violent offender and drug dealer migrant who DESERVES a happy stereotypical German life at taxpayers’ expense. “Will he make it?”
I cannot verify the accuracy of this Twitter post because the article is behind a paywall, but in light of experience it is all too believable. (And as best I recall Der Spiegel is left-wing.)
These are the opening sentences which are not paywalled:
I used to know a lot of fans. I have occasionally wanted to punch one in the mouth.
“You may fascinate a woman with a piece of cheese.”
It’s not excess generosity but rather the abandonment of judgment by those dispensing the subventions. The notion of ‘deserving poor’ has become anathema to the professionally compassionate.
Maybe there was a time when they were being lenient because of misplaced softheartedness, but they’ve gone full moral inversion lately — actively protecting criminals and prosecuting normies — so being victimized wouldn’t wake them up at all.
There’s an agenda here, one of mass demoralization, preparatory to the next steps of authoritarian takeover.
See also this Dalrymple anecdote on the erasure of such discernment.
Part of it, at least in terms of progressive media commentary, is that there’s little in-group status to be had in pretending to care about functional people of modest means. Instead, they pretend to care about more exotic demographics.
And so, among progressives, we get pretentious compassion for unrepentant and habitual thieves, habitual burglars, habitually criminal drivers. Because needlessly endangering the lives of others is now a basis for excuses, sympathy and applause.
Oh, and dog thieves and armed muggers. Obviously.
[ Post updated, significantly. ]
From that link –
THIS.
Well, it’s curious how, for example, Mr Stafford Smith, mentioned above, spends much more time chiding the victims of burglary, and the law-aiding generally, than he does the creatures who actually break into strangers’ homes and steal their belongings, and who do this over and over again.
The perpetrators, the aggressors, are offered excuses for their behaviour. The victims, however, are disdained as unsophisticated and low-status, with “idiotic attitudes.” Attitudes that Guardian readers should by implication find amusing and contemptible. Specifically, the belief that burglary is still in fact a crime and should still result in punishment, even when the burglar is “a young black person.”
Mr Stafford Smith goes on to boast that he dislikes Conservative voters much more than muggers and carjackers, and Ms Aitkenhead, his Guardian interviewer, claps along approvingly. The self-admiring duo casually insult the victims of crime – as if doing so were a credential, proof of their own elevation.
There’s a weirdly demented quality that’s not acknowledged as much as it should be.
aelfheld:
Most important words in that are “dispensing” and “professionally”.
The government – with its coercive power and inherent financial unaccountability – should not be an agent of charity.
That is what community is for.
[ Post updated again. ]
Never underestimate the Marxist motive to destroy society by any means available.
Re: Zoe
“She would of been a good woman […] if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
— “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor
I remember reading that story for the first time, getting to the last line, closing the book,a nd muttering, “Jesus . . .”
In the case of Stafford Smith and Ms Aitkenhead, what struck me was the air of posturing and adolescent delinquency. As if they were titillated by their own contrivance and moral perversity.
I mean, if you’re going to mock someone publicly, in a national newspaper, while sounding enormously self-satisfied, the victims of burglary are an odd choice.
Can I get an Amen?
It seems those who said Climatology was a religion were right. Meanwhile at a service…
Strikes one and two right there. RTWT.
Maybe not that odd, if one understands Marxism:
The gist of the Guardian exchange is,
I paraphrase, but just barely.
And contra Stafford Smith and his sidekick, the stuff being stolen is not just stuff. It’s the hours, weeks, or months of your life that were spent working in order to pay for the stolen objects, and of course the time and effort that may now be needed to replace them – assuming that whatever was taken or destroyed can be replaced.
As I said here:
I considered using the term moral pervert.
On the general topic of the thread, ‘The Lame Shall Enter First’ is a must read.
That’s the on in which a white middle class philanthropist social worker becomes so obsessed with trying to ‘rescue’ a permanently hostile and thoroughly unrepentant juvenile delinquent that he ends up completely neglecting his only son, his own flesh and blood, with tragic consequences for the both of them.
I would love someone like Zoe Williams to be asked to read and comment on it and see whether or not she is able to recognise the unflattering portrait she would find therein.
When a social system is seen as homologous with a manufacturing process, it cannot be the fault of the criminal for his crime, only the fault of the system that produced him.
It has to be one of the most disturbingly soulless visions of what it means to be human.
More practically, of course, it’s just another attempt to argue the case for putting an alternative system in place, one that will precision social engineer only the most content of citizens.
That is the sort of person who is attracted to leftism.
‘Moral insanity’ has a provenance, and the ‘progressive’ attitudes on display do seem to be psychopathy as social fashion.
Not a happy ending, if memory serves.
But that’s the thing. The mindset above, of the Zoes and Clives, seems not only morally absurd, but psychologically obnoxious. It’s not just wrong, like some kind of error anyone might make. It’s contrived, perverse. It presumably requires effort, if only to ignore the obvious replies.
Among which, Zoe Meets The Murgatroyds.
Having only just this morning heard of the extraordinary experiment in social engineering going on in Springfield, Ohio, something along similar lines was on my mind on the way to work today.
I would anticipate very similar results to this reality TV proposal – which I would dearly love to see (but only with a director such as Vanessa Engle).
I would quite like to see a large scale housing complex / barracks for processing asylum seekers dumped right on top of Chipping Norton or in the midst of Holland Park, London, where many residents regularly advocate for this kind of thing, instead of some former pit village in a remote Welsh valley, where the residents are typically quite vocal in their opposition to it.
As with what happened in Martha’s Vineyard not so long ago when Ron De Santis called their bluff – an event which Joe Biden, without any hint of irony or self-reflection, described as “reckless”, “un-American” and “playing with people’s lives”.
The more time goes by, the harder it is not to see all of this as a deliberate and unprovoked act of aggression by one part of the population on another.
[ Imagines opening titles. ]
The core of progressivism is the notion that humans are infinitely malleable, can be molded into any shape, and mass graves are just factory discard piles.
Ouch. Appreciate your attention to detail. 👍
Think I owe you a ping too. Keep up the good work.
Ice picks work as well. More cost effective.
Imagining Thurston and Harper’s first encounter with the Murgatroyd brood would, I think, tell us much. Perhaps they could discuss the Murgatroyds’ collection of Asbos, or compare notes on graveyard muggings and police sieges that resulted from a confiscated football.
Bless you, sir. May your peaches be ripe.
[ Slides tip jar to more prominent position, adds fairy lights. ]
Didn’t Stalin send bills to the families for the bullets?
Zoe Meets The Murgatroyds
Would definitely watch. Although I wonder if the miscreant neighbors are a bit too pale to elicit much sympathy from the Zoe’s of the world. The Zoe’s do like “travelers” though, so maybe the Murgatroyds could claim ancestry there. Or make the females wear burkas and claim Islam for a religion. Otherwise they’re just white people behaving badly and should have the book thrown at ’em.
LOL. I thought you were joking…
Oh, I think the best of us would struggle to out-do reality in this case.
As a wee seedling visiting my grandad, I remember he would occasionally have to extract a neighbour’s errant football from his flower beds. On one occasion, after muttering about his flattened whatever-they-were, he decided not to return it. To the best of my recollection, no violent unrest or police siege ensued.
Remember this trans would-be axe murderer? (Saw a mention here.)
Would somebody please explain why Dr. Frank N Furter is a sympathetic character?
–So that people can be “educated” out of any and all social dysfunctions.
And simultaneously the notion that feral humans are just fine the way they are.
A symptom of the degree of unreality in the prog universe is the complete lack of interest in mass graves caused by communist regimes. Remember the “killing fields”–never acknowledged by the Left. The lack of sympathy for Dear Mrs. Wilson mugged in her 80s is the same on a smaller scale. These people lack true compassion and only have fake compassion for scum if it gets them points with their peers. Note that when thugs are killing each other, there is not a peep for the victims, even though moments ago they were being lauded as heroes. They are cold as ice.
I note that our current dem pres/vp slate have refused to even respond to questions about recently murdered Hamas hostages. They just run away. Little shits.
A famous science fiction writer only left the Communist Party USA when he found out about the Hitler-Stalin pact. Everything that happened before he either excused or approved. But I don’t think he ever really turned away from communism, instead embracing a “America is just as bad” stance.
Indeed. And the leftists I knew in the 60’s and 70’s denied that terrorism was a favorite tool of the Vietnamese communists. The terrorism either didn’t exist, or was exaggerated, or was justified.
Much as they do with Islamic terrorism now.
As are those who will vote for them. Just saw that another “conservative” friend from high school has been quoting a lot of Dick Cheney. Her father was a judge. Pretty sure they came here from Cuba, though that’s something I have inferred rather than known for a fact. Either way, the next reunion will likely be rather awkward. Since the Covid mess, so many “conservative” friends have revealed their clay foundations. We are in this mess with criminal scum running the streets and even our society precisely because the “conservatives” that we thought were decent people, whom we put in positions of power and influence, were really social cowards underneath. They didn’t just start selling us out since Covid. This sort of fundamental weakness goes back further than this. It was never about the principles, it was about the grift and their social standing. They sold us out.
Were the fights instigated by arrogant college kids despising townies, or locals who resented college kids?
I grew up in a college town with a significant manifacturing base, and if my experience is representative the college kids made snarky remarks about the locals while slumming until somebody decided to shut them up (a.k.a. every Saturday night in Kitchener).
I used to know a lot of fans
While I’ve seen firsthand all manner of Xenogenesis-like phenomena, assuming that anything any woman says in a social media video is a blatant lie is also a sensible default position.
There’s an agenda here, one of mass demoralization, preparatory to the next steps of authoritarian takeover
Sooner or later, everyone comes around to Bezmenov.
That fits with what I recall of my college years: There was widespread, open, unashamed contempt for the “townies”. I only know what students said on campus in my presence as I was not part of the bar-hopping culture, but that was enough to begin my slow disillusionment with “smart people” and academia.
Fair enough.
Case in point for both sides of that: Harlan Ellison had a thin skin and a reputation for combativeness which sometimes became physical. (He once leaped at a fellow guest during a taping of a Tom Snyder(?) late night talk show when she expressed an opinion which offended him for its frank conservatism.) But on the other hand he could be charming and some fans would set out to offend him, so there you are.
And then Pinochet helicopter tours?
I might guess a town having another significant source of income would have impact on that. The closest thing my college town had to anything non-university related was an archery manufacturer. My roommate was local and I spent a good bit of a couple years hanging with his high school friends who had a band. The guitarist was a bit older but he worked at the archery plant. I never sensed any friction except for the rare good-natured stuff. The town was heavily dependent upon the university both employment wise and as it defined the town culture.
One reason why research into racial differences in intelligence and cognition is regarded as tainted and undesirable
Another “violence interrupter” with a violent past dies getting violent with the police.
It’s almost as if “violence interrupter” is a scam invented by leftists and thugs.
And then Pinochet helicopter tours?
Every day at noon, twice on Sundays.
The Crystal Palace.
Every day at noon, twice on Sundays.
So many natural wonders to explore. Niagara Falls, Rocky Mountains, Grand Canyon, the Badlands, the Great Lakes; no added clean-up expenses, no need for ground penetrating radar.
No reason to inflict the ferals on Zoe’s neighbours. Just make all the guardian columnists live on a sink estate for a month.
Vanessa Engle’s three-part documentary series Lefties is still among my favourites. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s quite revealing and often darkly funny.
Property is Theft.
Angry Wimmin.
A Lot of Balls.
I think we’ll give that one a post of its own.
Comments that-a-way.
Links here that go to youtube and my clicking around on history vids has turned up lots of ads for Kamala campaign (not one for Trump) BUT every single one, whether featuring Bernie, Kamala herself, or Obama, merely ask for money. Not a single statement of their position.
One thing about the Murgatroyds seems astonishing: that this couple has remained a couple, and seemingly faithful, long enough to have 12 children. Such behavior is rare among high-functioning people.
Most dysfunctionals are promiscuous; if they have multiple children, it’s with multiple partners. (My maternal grandmother – who died long before I was born – was apparently one such. She had seven children by at least five different men.)
That struck me as well. Imagine what their neighbors think of such behavior.
Theodore Dalrymple has written about the effects of this attitude on various individuals who were under his care as a physician.