Thought For the Day
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I hate change-in-rate graphs, probably because they’re usually used to scare people, but this one is very clearly labeled and they are useful for identifying where new trends start.
The murder rate for 2019 was about 5%, so if it’s a 30% increase in rate that’s about six and a half percent murder rate, which is about mid-nineties….when things were so bad in the “oh, don’t actually PUNISH the criminals” stuff that California put in their three strikes law.
All at once….
They don’t have preliminary, but 1986-2019 here:
https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend
It’s almost jejune to point out that “Black Lives Matter” has nothing to do with concern for the lives of actual blacks, a great deal to do with an offensive against deplorables driven by status considerations. Gentry liberals come in about three varieties: the terminally addle-pated and sentimental, obnoxious fools, and malevolent people. Every once in a while you might meet a congenial policy wonk like Harold Pollack, but he’s as rare as hen’s teeth.
I think I can do this…um, the recent scandals of police violence and subsequent defunding has pushed the,,,racist police…to commit more acts of violence against blacks, resulting in far more urban murders by police! Yes! Once you go non-Euclidian, you can connect any two points with a straight line, no matter how curvy and crooked.
This is how civilizations collapse.
This is how civilizations collapse.
Dunno. I think one of the more recent examples of a civilization collapsing entirely would have been Roman Britain in the 5th century. Don’t think this was how it went down.
One of the terms I’ve heard used by police to describe their deterrent effect is the phrase “visible footprint.”
You let everyone know you’re there with patrols and the like.
Easy to imagine that such footprints have shrunk all over the place the last year-plus.
That one fascinates me. A bit chilling, too.
An urban society that existed for the better part of four centuries just stutters out entirely.
All earthly constructs end.
The skyrocketing murder rate is only one, tiny piece of the putrid puzzle. Many other post-modern dysfunctions mirror those which fomented the decline and fall of the Roman empire.
And, it is by design.
Well, I have it on the highest authority that the problem is guns. C-Bus’s mayor and city council, the police and the local media have all said that’s the problem here in our neck of the woods.
An urban society that existed for the better part of four centuries just stutters out entirely.
A question for historical geographers and anthropologists. I’m remembering a book I was assigned to read many moons ago by one Edward Whiting Fox History in geographic perspective; the other France which has a model of the process of state formation. Note the Vandals, Visigoths, and the Ostrogoths insert themselves at the apex of the social order in the Maghreb, in Iberia, and in Italia and Illyria and life goes on, perhaps less affluent and less urbanized but passably similar. Interesting to contemplate how outcomes might have been different had Justinian left well enough alone. Frankish Gaul is more troublesome, in part because the patrimonial monarchy generates warfare among brothers. Now you look at the British Isles, and there isn’t much supralocal authority at all and most of what there is is assembled by Germanic invaders over a period of 4 centuries and change, then extended over Wales and Ireland in a process that took another 700 years or so. The counterpoint was the emergence of Scotland as a territorial state, and that still took 700 years.