Re: Depraved Britain : Fri Mar 09, 2012 3:10 pm  

Dally wrote:

Actually, I am a happy go lucky person. Always smiling, always happy.

Your scribblings are at variance with that.

Dally wrote:

I have been accused of leaving a trail of broken, depressed people in my wake. But, that's only because they have "issues."

Broken and depressed?
Sounds familiar.

They have issues?
But of course you don't?

Re: Depraved Britain : Fri Mar 09, 2012 7:56 pm  

Dally wrote:

The facts of crime, reported crime, types of crime, etc, etc do bear out my views.

Do they? In what way? Kindly furnish us with these facts? You know, the facts I've requested 3 times.

The BCS shows in 2009/10 that crime was at its lowest level for 30 years.
Recorded crime shows crime at a comparative level to 30 years ago.
And that's in absolute numbers, not taking into account demographic changes, technological changes and a population increase of around 6 million people.

What do your facts show?

Re: Depraved Britain : Sat Mar 10, 2012 12:38 pm  

Him wrote:

Do they? In what way? Kindly furnish us with these facts? You know, the facts I've requested 3 times.

The BCS shows in 2009/10 that crime was at its lowest level for 30 years.
Recorded crime shows crime at a comparative level to 30 years ago.
And that's in absolute numbers, not taking into account demographic changes, technological changes and a population increase of around 6 million people.

What do your facts show?

I think I posted it here, but I was reading a piece recently about 'why right-wingers are not compassionate'. Now it was very much about the US and the Tea Party sort. But some of the comments have, I think, a more general basis in reality.

There do seem to be people who don't like facts – indeed, who won't believe them those facts if they go against what that person believes. And I think that those people actually enjoy that. The Wail makes money on that basis – it was Rothermere's editorial approach that you gave the readers a daily diet of stories to shock and scandalise them. Thus you will hardly ever see a positive Wail cover story.

I suppose it's a form of glass half empty – but may parents (Wail readers) are absolutely like this. I was a platform steward at the Islington rally when the first Poll Tax was set and was on the steps outside the town hall when the riot police came around the corner on horseback. I know that there had been no trouble before – the local police had been calm and hadn't risen to any bait from a few nutters at the front of the crowd who were spoiling for it to get 'tasty'.

Yet my parents quite clearly said to me, later, that they did not believe my version of events. It didn't tally with that of the Wail, so clearly I was the one with an 'agenda' that meant I would tell lies about events.

I think it's similar: they preferred a certain type of view – and the more dystopian the better. I do wonder if that age-old tendency to bemoan the here and now and hark back to a 'golden age' is a part of aging in general.

Re: Depraved Britain : Sat Mar 10, 2012 12:57 pm  

I think you're right in that there does seem to be a tendency to bemoan the here and now in favour of the past by more senior members of society. I think it's partly as you say down to media with constant negative stories and very, very, very few positive ones and partly because they probably simply enjoyed that period of their life more than currently.
I'm not naive enough to think everything is rosy these days, there are big issues facing society, but neither do I think that there has been some kind of huge moral decline. I think people are just about as caring and compassionate as they've always been. I just think the way in people show it has changed and that while some areas possibly are worse (community/neighbour relations maybe? It can be a lonely world these days) but some things are better (there are fewer people starving).

I don't particularly mind Dally having his viewpoint even if I think it's daft, it's when he pretends there are facts to back him up but doesn't produce them.

Re: Depraved Britain : Sat Mar 10, 2012 1:35 pm  

Mintball wrote:

Spot on.

My parents are as stupid. They have this mad belief that, at some point in the past (I'm convinced it's the 1950s), everything was somehow perfect and that it's all a mess now because of the permissive society.

And yet they know that domestic violence is not new (and not even limited to their own fighting). They know that sexual abuse is not new – as just one example of this, my father, as a clergyman, has found himself dealing with very elderly parishoners whose lives were blighted by abuse that happened before WWII (and see Billy Connolly for another example of this).

My own father admitted to me one day, that he'd lost his virginity when 12 to a 14 year old girl in his Cornish backwater – a village on the edge of Bodmin Moor, with no TV or anything else to spread that permissive filth, in the days shortly after WWII: an admission that reveals how utterly crass his subsequent drive to 'blame' post-1960s life for sex are.

And as I intimated in my previous post, if you know anything about the history of this country, beyond the names and dates of monarchs, you'd know it is utter nonsense to pretend that there was any such halcyon era when nothing impolite ever happened.

18th century, cross-class gangs of young men holding up coaches and then burning them out (car jacking was new?).

Not that long ago, when this sort of subject came up, I posted a raft of links to stuff about gangs across Victorian England.

You could find stuff about looting during the Blitz. You could find things about police no-go areas in cities across the countries (specific examples in London: Borough at the end of the 19th century, Bermondsey in the early 20th century). Read Dickens to see that political corruption existed long ago – look at Hogarth to see the same thing, along with boozy brawling. And on the subject of that boozy brawling, read Virginia Woolf to see that women getting wrecked and then fighting in the street is hardly new either – she wrote of such a thing in a book first published in 1921.

But Dally and his ilk don't care for facts. They'd far rather have the pleasure they seem to derive from their Chicken Licken approach to everything.

I was born in the 1950's and as you say, bad things happened then as they do now. I'd say though that the main difference between then and now is, back then, most people thought things would only get better and better, they had hope. This may have been because of the tv programme "Tomorrows World" which basically said we'd all have 11 months a year holiday and fly around using a jet pack, or it could have been that following the war, there was a feeling that we weren't going to let the barstewards grind us down ever again. Unfortunately, this is what appears to be happening and Dally may be using the wrong example to show moral decline or depravity.

Re: Depraved Britain : Sat Mar 10, 2012 3:25 pm  

Whether we are any less moral today than we were thirty years ago is impossible to tell. However, I do think there's a strong argument for the dissipation of social bonds in the face of the insatiable selfishness of capitalist ideology.

"Community" is a difficult concept to define but I know it when I see it. And over the last twenty or thirty years I've seen increasingly less of it (whether it be the old matriarch who doubled as a greengrocer to the poor living in my gran's block of terraced houses, or the mums who took turns to look after upwards of ten kids during the summer holidays etc.) . Some argue the Internet has now superseded reality as the medium for social interaction and community. But so far I think it's running a pretty dismal second place.

Re: Depraved Britain : Sat Mar 10, 2012 4:51 pm  

Things change, they don't get worse necessarily they become different.

The reduction in community is quite understandable nowadays because things are different and that's all it is.
There has been no conscious decision to get less 'friendly'.

When I was a lad people lived in one place nearly all their lives. Work was local and often in massive industries. Cars were fewer etc etc. I don't need to list all the factors.
So people knew each other better, because they spent more time together.

Things are better in many ways and worse in some ways.
I NEVER think that this is a sh/t time to live, in fact quite the opposite.

I was born into a little oasis in time which was relatively peaceful, relatively well off, relatively healthy etc.
I was and am bloody lucky and know it.
People who moan in this country about the state of affairs, given the abject misery elsewhere in the world, ought to count their lucky stars instead.

And yes, the 'things were better in my day' view is a function of growing old/er.
I would love to go back in time to live it all again, but I don't think times are worse today because of that wish.
There is just something special about salad days that we long for.
Shagging like a ram mainly.

Re: Depraved Britain : Sat Mar 10, 2012 6:16 pm  

Was it as bad as the scum that were around during the war: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/ ... h-blackout Robbing and looting during the Blitz? Shows how bad society had got under Churchill's Britain.

Was it as bad as the scum that were around during the war: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/ ... h-blackout Robbing and looting during the Blitz? Shows how bad society had got under Churchill's Britain.

Re: Depraved Britain : Sat Mar 10, 2012 9:39 pm  

Dally wrote:

The decline really set in post WW2.

Interestingly, if you talk to the older generation, they'll tell you it got worse after WW1. I'm guessing that if you'd been able to talk to their parents, they'd tell you it got worse once Queen Vic died.

Things were always better in our youth, it's the way the mind works.


It doesn't make it true though.


(BTW, I can still only see tea and kittens, it's great!)

Re: Depraved Britain : Sat Mar 10, 2012 11:09 pm  

sally cinnamon wrote: Was it as bad as the scum that were around during the war: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/ ... h-blackout Robbing and looting during the Blitz? Shows how bad society had got under Churchill's Britain. true enough but just to remind you that the war government was a coalition government and the same problems would have arisen if Atlee, or indeed anyone else had been PM at that difficult time

sally cinnamon wrote: Was it as bad as the scum that were around during the war: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/ ... h-blackout Robbing and looting during the Blitz? Shows how bad society had got under Churchill's Britain. true enough but just to remind you that the war government was a coalition government and the same problems would have arisen if Atlee, or indeed anyone else had been PM at that difficult time