Quote ="Him"What evidence do you have for a moral decline? I don't know about you but I see far more acts of kindness and sacrifice day to day than I do that could characterise a "moral decline". Oh and as the Leveson Inquiry has proved we can't trust newspapers so sensationalist bullshiiit scaremongering Daily Mail articles don't count as evidence.'" You must be young if you think that. In my lifetime the decline has been dramatic and to be honest it is no longer the country I was brought up in on so many levels. For those 30 odd years older than me it must be awful. You ought to read this book: www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Death-M ... 1412806224 (Which for a lover of 'evidence' like you is based throughout on the British government's own statistics). (Cue the usual suspects dissing the author, just like the Tories used to mock Scargill).

Quote ="Him"What evidence do you have for a moral decline? I don't know about you but I see far more acts of kindness and sacrifice day to day than I do that could characterise a "moral decline". Oh and as the Leveson Inquiry has proved we can't trust newspapers so sensationalist bullshiiit scaremongering Daily Mail articles don't count as evidence.'" You must be young if you think that. In my lifetime the decline has been dramatic and to be honest it is no longer the country I was brought up in on so many levels. For those 30 odd years older than me it must be awful. You ought to read this book: www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Death-M ... 1412806224 (Which for a lover of 'evidence' like you is based throughout on the British government's own statistics). (Cue the usual suspects dissing the author, just like the Tories used to mock Scargill).

I couldn't possibly comment regarding moral decline . My moral standard is way below what I would be expect everyone elses to be . If morals decline to my standards then I will be a happy man , but I DON'T doubt that there would be a lot of unhappy fathers and husbands out there

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Quote ="Dally"You must be young if you think that. In my lifetime the decline has been dramatic and to be honest it is no longer the country I was brought up in on so many levels. For those 30 odd years older than me it must be awful. You ought to read this book: www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Death-M ... 1412806224 (Which for a lover of 'evidence' like you is based throughout on the British government's own statistics). (Cue the usual suspects dissing the author, just like the Tories used to mock Scargill).'" In what way has it been dramatic? What is dramatically worse than it was 30 years ago when taking into account technological/demographic changes etc Were drastically fewer people being killed? Drastically fewer people abused? Drastically fewer crimes? I have no intention of buying and reading such a book, since you obviously have read it what statistics does it use to account for a moral decline? How is it measured? How have the methods of recording those statistics changed over decades? Does it take into account population and other changes? Again, I will ask for evidence of such a shocking moral decline in this country.

Quote ="Dally"You must be young if you think that. In my lifetime the decline has been dramatic and to be honest it is no longer the country I was brought up in on so many levels. For those 30 odd years older than me it must be awful. You ought to read this book: www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Death-M ... 1412806224 (Which for a lover of 'evidence' like you is based throughout on the British government's own statistics). (Cue the usual suspects dissing the author, just like the Tories used to mock Scargill).'" In what way has it been dramatic? What is dramatically worse than it was 30 years ago when taking into account technological/demographic changes etc Were drastically fewer people being killed? Drastically fewer people abused? Drastically fewer crimes? I have no intention of buying and reading such a book, since you obviously have read it what statistics does it use to account for a moral decline? How is it measured? How have the methods of recording those statistics changed over decades? Does it take into account population and other changes? Again, I will ask for evidence of such a shocking moral decline in this country.

Quote ="Dally"You must be young if you think that. In my lifetime the decline has been dramatic and to be honest it is no longer the country I was brought up in on so many levels. For those 30 odd years older than me it must be awful. You ought to read this book: www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Death-M ... 1412806224 (Which for a lover of 'evidence' like you is based throughout on the British government's own statistics). (Cue the usual suspects dissing the author, just like the Tories used to mock Scargill).'" Just how old are you?

Quote ="Dally"You must be young if you think that. In my lifetime the decline has been dramatic and to be honest it is no longer the country I was brought up in on so many levels. For those 30 odd years older than me it must be awful. You ought to read this book: www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Death-M ... 1412806224 (Which for a lover of 'evidence' like you is based throughout on the British government's own statistics). (Cue the usual suspects dissing the author, just like the Tories used to mock Scargill).'" Just how old are you?

Quote ="Dally"Another example of our sick society: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... hefts.html'" Nope, still getting tea and kittens. Best plug in ever.

Quote ="Dally"Another example of our sick society: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... hefts.html'" Nope, still getting tea and kittens. Best plug in ever.

I was waiting for his 'we're all going to die in the solar storm' thread!

Are you not familiar with Dally's work?

I think i'm a bit of both !

He's younger than me.

Reading the synopsis of the book, I'm not surprised that Dally is attracted to the message. Both he and the author seem to live in this fantasy where 30+ years ago we all lived in harmony, through fear that we'd be outed as shirtlifters, divorcees or non-church goers.

Now my memory may have faded somewhat but I can't recollect a time when there were no child abusers, murderers, thieves and assorted vagabonds. The only reason the odd person wasn't thieving from a charity shop in the 1960s/70s was because there were no charity shops to thieve from.

Not old enough to have invested the time to learn anything at all about the history of Britain.

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.

When I was 16 years old in 1972 the brother of one of my class mates kicked to death a railway porter outside a pub in Leeds because the railway porter was rumoured to be gay, or at least he was one of a group of six men from the pub who dragged the porter outside and kicked him to death because he was rumoured to be gay - they all got several years for manslaughter.

When I was 13 years old in 1969 some Leeds City Police officers chased a black African vagrant out of the city centre because he was black and they didn't want him there, he was found dead in the river Aire some days later, it was the first recorded incident of institutional racism from a police force and two officers served time for assault over a long period of time against David Oluwale.

I don't think things have got dramatically worse since then.

Dally would have given the first group medals – and probably the second group too.

Quote ="Dally"You must be young if you think that. In my lifetime the decline has been dramatic and to be honest it is no longer the country I was brought up in on so many levels. For those 30 odd years older than me it must be awful. You ought to read this book: www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Death-M ... 1412806224 (Which for a lover of 'evidence' like you is based throughout on the British government's own statistics). (Cue the usual suspects dissing the author, just like the Tories used to mock Scargill).'" Why would anyone want to diss this particular author. He's clearly got a political agenda as have all author's on this subject. FWIW people have been writing this sort of trash throughout history, with each generation desperately trying to prove a moral decline from previous 'golden eras.' It's as much b*llocks now as it was when Thucydides bewailed the moral degeneration of Greek society during the Peloponnesian War. The term 'moral decadence' itself dates back to the middle ages and crops up every decade in right-wing treatises and journals, usually as a justification for further restrictions on civil liberties. As for age - I really don't know what on earth you think that's got to do with it. Personal experience will always be both limited (even over a full human lifespan) and subjective. It is as relevant to this argument as personally visiting the moon is relevant to knowing it has craters.

Quote ="Dally"You must be young if you think that. In my lifetime the decline has been dramatic and to be honest it is no longer the country I was brought up in on so many levels. For those 30 odd years older than me it must be awful. You ought to read this book: www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Death-M ... 1412806224 (Which for a lover of 'evidence' like you is based throughout on the British government's own statistics). (Cue the usual suspects dissing the author, just like the Tories used to mock Scargill).'" Why would anyone want to diss this particular author. He's clearly got a political agenda as have all author's on this subject. FWIW people have been writing this sort of trash throughout history, with each generation desperately trying to prove a moral decline from previous 'golden eras.' It's as much b*llocks now as it was when Thucydides bewailed the moral degeneration of Greek society during the Peloponnesian War. The term 'moral decadence' itself dates back to the middle ages and crops up every decade in right-wing treatises and journals, usually as a justification for further restrictions on civil liberties. As for age - I really don't know what on earth you think that's got to do with it. Personal experience will always be both limited (even over a full human lifespan) and subjective. It is as relevant to this argument as personally visiting the moon is relevant to knowing it has craters.

I think the solar storm thing is likely to be over-hyped. Mind you, if National Grid have got their calculations wrong......

The decline really set in post WW2.

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

Is it a disappointment to wake and find you're still alive?

Actually, I am a happy go lucky person. Always smiling, always happy. I have been accused of leaving a trail of broken, depressed people in my wake. But, that's only because they have "issues."

I imagine, in person you're probably quite funny.

Dally, you should move to [url=http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/police_appeal_for_lost_birthday_card_owner_to_come_forward_1_1229910Bungay, Suffolk[/url, if that's the most the coppers have to concern themselves with

Oh gosh – what "types" of crimes have been invented in this "depraved" island nation of ours in the last 60 years or so that didn't exist before?

I reckon that, back in Dally's day, the worst crime anyone ever heard about was that some little scamp had been scrumping apples or playing knock off ginger. Sure, there might have been the odd light-hearted knife-point rape here and there, but if you didn't go out of your way to find out about it, you were none the wiser.

Your scribblings are at variance with that.


Broken and depressed?
Sounds familiar.

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

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 [iWail[/i 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 [iWail[/i cover story.

I suppose it's a form of glass half empty – but may parents ([iWail[/i 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 [iWail[/i, 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.