Society

[zadok]

A brave man that Noah. Going out in a wooden boat with two termites.

Ripper

[Ixion]

It seems to all come down to this curious dichotomy between the 'master of my fate' school, and the 'invisible hand of society' school.

while we are, for all campers and dolphins*, the masters of our own personal domain; there are very real societal factors, which over a large population sample, will change individuals' behaviour patterns.

there is a HUGE difference between allowing EvilBaddieCrimeDoers to blame their mis-deeds on their upbringing/income/race/whatever (which is charitably described as 'overzealous PC nonsense'), and acknowledging that these social factors do in fact exist.

once we have simple acknowledgement, we can begin to identify these factors, and then work on changing them.

we need to operate a low form of 'doublethink', holding the idea that, yes, in fact people are directly responsible for their actions (or else we couldn't lock no-one up, see ), while also actively working on building a society that quite simply produces less criminals.

too many people are so wrapped up in 'cult of the individual' thinking to even consider the social causes of problems such as crime. they are to a large extent operating under one of the main capitalist lies, that "1,000 people working selfishly in their own self-interest will produce the most favourable outcome for those 1,000 as a whole". it seems so ridiculous as to be rejected out of hand, yet it is one of the main tenets of the capitalist thinking that we are subjected to from birth. we cannot make much progress until we completely and finally reject this.


while I will not totally disagree with the idea of the Labour government, at least on a very superficial level, encouraging the culture of 'blame your crime on something', there is a sadly overwhelming body of evidence that shows that right-wing, neo-liberal (uber-Keynesian) economic and social policy ALWAYS leads to greater socio-economic disparity, the grandaddy of all crime factors. if someone were to produce a chart of relative economic disparity and crime levels in NZ over the past 20 years, the results would be totally clear-cut.

in short, I'm a filthy communist and don't believe anything I say (but please do)

* in-tents and porpoises

/me is a Communist also, but a CLEAN communist, cos I had a shower this morning. So you must believe EVERYTHING I say .

Welcome fellow traveller , but please stay down wind.

(There is much truth in what he says BTW)

[Motu]

For those of us who grew up in an earlier age,an mentioned in the first post of Lou's it certainly seems a different world,murder was big news.I remember the Basset Rd machine gun murders,we were still talking about it in the 70s - Ron Jorgenson was a legend,and maybe...perhaps,in his time he was a ''better'' person than those doing far less time now for crimes far worse,after all,his was just a rather extravagant murder.I remember when some guys I went to school with (and as I later found out,may actualy be related to me,cuzzies) the guys who rolled an old man in Lagoon Drive Panmure,stabbing him 17 times with a screwdriver,but not killing him - I remember that was huge,a big thing,probably page 3 now.

And now,in the last say,six years I have lived in a couple of places where murders happened less than 100 metres from our house,hardly raises an eyebrow these days.You may be aware that I now live in Huntly....a friend of mine had his wife shot and killed here about 10 yrs ago,but I feel no malice around me.....I let my kids play in the park during the day without too much supervision,as we can see them from the house....and yet we visit and are visited by my daughter 100mts away in the car when it's dark,I find that very annoying,that I am ''scared'' of my own wellbeing and that of my family - it never used to be this way.....believe it or not.

[SixPackBack]

My humble opinion the death penalty, simple; no arguement, you do it you die.
An added benifit is the positive results to Darwinism. Removal of the negative genes benifits future mankind, making the likelyhood of this type of antisocial behaviour over time less likely.
Line them up, i will gladly deal with them.We should not be 'thinking' about the death penalty but using it widely.