A long article in the (ideological broadsheet)
City Journal on the inability of the British state to maintain public safety, yet, at the same time, rigorously enforce political correctness.
It's a long article, written in Victorian British, so I will post only paraphrases:
The first involves a self-educated barrister (some sort of lawyer) being beaten nearly senseless by drunken yobs and their slut girlfriend. Not only that, the brain-damaged lawyer now faces mandatory psychotherapy for having unresolved "anger issues" against his assailants.
The second is a story of an engineer who likewise was beaten, this time the son of African immigrants, for having the nerve to ask them to vacate his property .
In both cases, the British justice system saw fit to sentence the dear darling youths to 12 month prison sentence, half commuted, for attempted murder.
On the other hand, a drunk Oxford student had the book thrown at him, a night in jail and a fine, by the PC establishment for this:
The newspapers reported the case of an Oxford student who, slightly drunk after celebrating the end of his exams, approached a mounted policeman. “Excuse me,” said the young man to the policeman, “do you realize your horse is gay?”In sum:
... the zeitgeist of the country is now one of sentimental moralizing combined with the utmost cynicism, where the government’s pretended concern for the public welfare coexists with the most elementary dereliction of duty. There is an absence of any kind of idealism that is a necessary precondition of probity, so that bad faith prevails almost everywhere. The government sees itself as an engineer of souls (to use the phrase so eloquently coined by Stalin with regard to writers who, of course, were expected to mold Homo Sovieticus by the power of their words). Government thus concerns itself with what people think, feel, and say—as well as with trying to change their freely chosen habits—rather than with performing its one inescapable duty: that of preserving the peace and ensuring that citizens may go about their lawful business in confidence and safety. It is more concerned that young men should not smoke cigarettes in prison or make silly jokes to policemen than that they should not attack and permanently maim their elders and betters. It sounds as though British society is much the same as it was back in Charles Dickens's day.
