Urrrrgh...

Not sure what I think about this case. Sticking two fingers up to government is always a worthwhile and excellently British activity, still there's something else there. There's the suspicion that if she'd been a small businesswoman from Leeds, she wouldn't have got the kid gloves treatment, but there's more to it than just the class war aspect of it.

Listen to Oxbridge and you could be convinced that day can't break without their input, but every time the wheels come off, the self-same peoiple try and make out that they're John Galt. Enough already. No single social group has done more to make modern Britain what it is than these people, so we can do without their whining on the few occasions when they get a turn in the barrel.

How Carboard Boxes Prove Supremacy Of Marxist-Leninism

Yep, it's another Great Leap Forward for science: licensed scientists have proven that living in a Marxist dictatorship gives people a greater sense of empathy - thereby making this perhaps the gayest excuse yet for tyranny.

I could point out that there might just be one or two confounding variables here, but that misses the more interesting point. What's with all this talk about 'American culture' and 'Chinese culture' ? Surely all cultures are the same, except for the dancing ? Oops, no. Having a network of labour camps, not having one, who's to say which is best ? But 'empathy', now that there's some hard-edged metric. So other cultures are either every bit as valid as Western culture or they're better, all of which is by way of saying that this is yet another way in which Liberalism has become the ideology of first wives everywhere.

Why It Matters

Steyn on why the annual KristmasKampf is worth fighting:

This isn't about religion. Jesus is doing just fine in the United States. Forty years of ACLU efforts to eliminate God from the public square have led to a resurgent, evangelical and politicized American Christianity unique in the Western world. What the rabbi in Seattle and the cops in Riverside are doing is colluding in an assault on something more basic: They're denying the possibility of any common culture. America is not a stamp collection with one of each. It's an overwhelmingly Christian country with freedom of religion for those who aren't. But it's quite an expansion of "freedom of religion" to argue that "those who aren't" are entitled to forbid any public expression of America's Christian inheritance except as part of an all-U-can-eat interfaith salad bar. In their initial reaction, Seattle Airport got it right: To be forced to have one of everything is, ultimately, the same as having nothing. So you might as well cut to the chase

Rearranging The Dictionaries On The Titanic

Laban points to an interesting mixed message in the Liberal line on the unfortunate happenings in Ipswich, namely were the deceased the poor, disenfranchised losers in the lottery of life under Casino Capitalism, or were they Amazonian sexecutives in the flesh industry, sticking it to the man and his tired, old views about ‘morality’ and the like ?

This isn’t just a matter of tone or nuance – it goes to the heart of a real pathology in modern Britain. That’s not to say, both lines of argument aren’t garbage in and off themselves. The Welfare State gets a lot of stick, but at least it means women aren’t forced to sell their bodies to feed their families. On the other hand, smackhead hookers as the shock troops of female liberation doesn’t really ring true.

It’s hard enough for the best of us to do the right thing, but these women not only had to overcome their own background, but also a culture determined to tell them that they were either hopeless victims, or worse, defiant rebels.

We have a culture that glamorises dysfunctional lifestyles while denigrating traditional family values. Hell, look at the number of actresses who’ve been Oscar nominated for playing hookers. There’s Julia Roberts (Pretty Woman), Kim Basinger (L.A. Confidential), Sharon Stone (Casino)….and so on. Meanwhile, whenever Hollyweird touches on normal family life, it’s just to remind us, as in American Beauty, that a stable relationship is the worst of all possible fates that can befall anyone.

No, no one wants to bring back the scarlet letter or whatever, but let's face reality: you can have all the drug rehabilitation programs in the world, but if the smackheads don’t see why they should come off the junk, they’ll keep shooting up. Ditto, with swords, oakleaves and gold cluster, the idea that all types of relationship are equally ‘special’. No, they aren’t.

If Liberals want to place the Ipswich murders in some kind of broader sociological context, then they can start with themselves and all the Liberals who depicted snorting coke as delightfully decadent or sexual anarchy as a sign of sophistication. But, true to form, the Left has gone the other way. They’re worried that by calling prostitutes ‘prostitutes’ we’re dehumanising them. Nope, selling their bodies dehumanised them, and everything else followed from that, right up to the horrific final act. Still, isn’t that Liberalism in a nutshell ? They can’t make things better, but they can make people talk about them more sensitively.