AT the end of The Bolt Report we got shown a clip of WA MP Andrew Waddell explaining crime rates:
The reality is we are not culling the young anymore. We are not sending them off to a foreign battlefield to actually kill other people and so consequently that is why they are on our streets. That’s the reality, we haven’t had a major conflict in a very long time.
Yes. Well. There you have it.
Mind you the logic behind that sort of comment isn’t new. It (briefly) used to be thought that legalised abortion had reduced crime rates in the US. The logic being:
Unwanted children, the story goes, are more likely to become criminals in later life. Abortion, legalised throughout the United States by the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade ruling in 1973, prevents unwanted pregnancies from becoming unwanted children. Higher abortion rates from the 1970s onwards thus help to explain why crime rates fell in America about two decades later.
That is probably a better hypothesis than ADF members are likely to be criminally inclined and better to send them offshore to kill others and/or be killed than have them at home. Not, however, that much better.
At the same time, however, the abortion – reduced crime hypothesis isn’t too good either. Errors have been found and subsequent analysis suggests the effect isn’t supported by the data.
Update: Clip now available.
So was he being funny, or serious. Lots of people will say that without really meaning it. “what this country/young people today needs is a good war”, etc
Stupid either way. One needs to pick one’s audience for that kind of “joke” very carefully, especially if in politics.
What an idiot!
Nothing to do with parenting, the problem is they haven’t been killed in war.
Well lets put it another way. If Waddell was vacuumed instead of being born we’d have one less Liars Party moron to contend with. In that respect abortion would have benefits.
Backbenchers! I fondly imagine what the ABC and lovefest media would do if he were a Lib. It would be outrage from Perth to Nauru via Bergen-Belsen.
‘Tother explanation is the kiddies don’t get the Top Ten explained to them anymore in schools. Not included in the Progressive Curriculum™. But again I wouldn’t expect a Labor pollie or the lurve media to understand the teaching of morality.
I thought this was going to be about Slater & Gordon sacking Gillard.
Gunnar Heinsohn has identified this problem some years back – one article – The effects of ‘Youth Bulge’ on civil conflicts.
Addison and Wiggin also note that in Financial Reckoning Day.
Next time there’s a draft, no more exemptions for people undergoing tertiary education. That might work…
I thought this was going to be about Slater & Gordon sacking Gillard.
Nor naieve
Dude was born in 1966. What’s this “we”/”they” shit? If anything, he’s one of the “they” who never faced “culling”.
Did living in such a relatively peaceful era wreck HIS generation, or just everyone after? Would he and his cohort have been better off culled in a war?
Maybe if Mr.Waddell’s Party stopped “importing” so many of them,particularly from the Middle East,there might be less of a problem but as most of the “imports” immediately go onto welfare and stay there and more than likely,vote Labor,I guess that’s a forlorn hope.
FMD. What an idiot.
if we ‘cull’ criminals, first up against the wall will be the entire ALP!
Cull. A reprehensible term when applied to human beings if the comment is in any way serious. It has shades of such crazy eugenics in it. (Sorry, this is me on my most high horse).
Cull the culture of victimhood and complaint, not those affected, especially the young. Margaret Thatcher nailed it when she said “Young people ought not to be idle; it is very bad for them”. Young people in any era need aspiration and opportunity and a good kick in that direction while a decent employment carrot is dangled before them. Otherwise anger and chaos and a life on welfare.
I’d use those useless pricks as cannon fodder. People with real skills are needed back home to not only keep the country running but to satisfy the sheilas urges.
Marvellous idea!
Applying that philosophy, if all “Emily’s List”, Greens and A.L.P. members aborted their children, then the National bank balance and aggregate I.Q. would both be substantially higher than they presently are.
Also, we would have far fewer brothel-hoppers, embezzlers, crooked ex-solicitors, kiddie fiddlers, wallet-stuffing obese union leaders, drowned passengers of the A.L.P.’s hourly Christmas Island shuttle service, arrested former A.L.P. National Presidents, comical meteorological advice being tendered by “little Green men”, an A.T.O. which will chase salary and wage earners to the ends of the earth, but utterly ignore millions in taxes dodged by corrupt A.L.P./union figures.
Not while we have government run schools/curriculum and teacher accreditation.
I’m not defending this fool but in a way he is right. It’s not the the soldiering but the national “pulling together” that’s been missing for generations. Since WWII every war has been divisive ,publicly speaking, and sport just can’t come close as not everybody follows every code fervently. National interest only ever a gets a gold if there is a really big, expensive and scary war going on. Most of Australias urban areas have been developed during the time of social complacency the two big wars generated. This effect is dwindling.
Steve Sailer deserves some of the credit for debunking the abortion and crime hypothesis:
http://www.isteve.com/abortion.htm
Can antone find any mention of this in the Lave media? I can’t.
It has to be said over and over agian. If it was a Coalition backbencher, they would be all over it. Demanding his resignation and lots of stories about how it reveals the dark underbelly of conservatives.
When it is one of their own. Not a peek.
Why are taxpayers still paying for the ABC and SBS?
On crime, the late James Q. Wilson set the record straight: higher incarceration rates led to reduced crime rates.
And in another way he is wrong and offensive.
He is insinuating that the heroes who were killed during WW1 and WW2 were criminals at heart.
I dare the fat prick to go to RSL house on Anzac day and proffer his theories.
That should alter the gene pool ‘i.e if you are a hard geneticist.
The violent young protagonist of a NZ novel Violence 101 has his own take on this issue. A reviewer sums his dilemma up quite well:
“Hamish doesn’t believe his violence is unwarranted. In fact, he believes “all good things come from violence in one way or another,” as he writes in the journal he’s forced to keep at the Manukau New Horizons Boys’ Institute, the third and latest reform school he’s been forced to attend.
“Hamish cites barbed-wire fencing and bulldozers as examples of technologies that were bred for war but have since found peacetime use. He references James Bond, who kills an average of 27 people per film in the blockbuster franchise.
He also idolizes Alexander the Great, the ancient conqueror, for his ruthlessness, intelligence and reckless bravery — qualities Hamish shares but that he believes hold no value in modern society.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/07/entertainment/la-ca-denis-wright-20101107
http://www.insideadog.com.au/books/violence-101
Yeah well, up until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, enlisting or press-ganging your surplus males onto the gundecks or into the firing lines might have thinned out the ranks of the urban idle.
But a bit of reading suggests that your citizen armies of the 20th century onwards tend to see your best-and-brightest leading by example, and taking the heaviest casualties.
And the converse being the shirkers and petty crims typically work their way as far out of the line of fire as possible.
This asshat’s observations are so ill-informed, one can only assume he has a bright future in a cabinet position awaiting him some day – clearly ministerial material.
A bit of reading suggests that’s not the case at all.
In the US during WWII, the rifle man in an infantry regiment, who bore the heaviest casualties, was from the bottom of the War Department barrel.
Hi lotocoti
No doubt as the mass enlistment of citizens into the total war militaries of the two great 20th century wars, streaming of troops happened.
If someone could be a fighter pilot or paratrooper, they would get streamed up into those units.
And as mass enlistment of officers occurred, no doubt the grunts may well be catastrophically led. Some of those classic documentaries of the US military in the Italian campaign are shocking examples of bad leadership.
Which never should have happened if time and circumstance had permitted better training.
But this dope from WA seems to be suggesting industrial scale warfare is some sort of Darwinian sorting mechanism to weed out the social dross.
Other than situations like Nazi and Soviet punishment battalions, my own view is that these and similar conflicts of the last 120 years have been quite the opposite of what this dumb arse is suggesting.
I am willing to stand corrected – I am only offering an opinion – I just think Waddell’s view is dangerously ill-informed in so many ways,
He’s right, inasmuch as the scum of society used to be the people the Napoleonic armies hoovered up and sent to die in Spain, Russia or any one of a number of other European battlefields. That isn’t happening any more.
What a malinformed knobber is Twaddell.
Imagine how much better this Country would be today if we hadn’t had the ‘flower’ of the generation, some 60 000 dinkums, killed overseas in WW1?
Oh, right, there would be looting and rioting galore.
Prized Twattle, perfect Labor carksucker. (US pron)
I am a retired psychologist I studied personality disorders in the States where we were informed that numbers were on the increase. When I enquired why, the answer was ‘the buggers breed and there hasn’t been a world war’. Antisocial behaviour and sociopaths are being investigated by Prof Robert Hare who suggests that they are infiltrating business politics etc . Fishhead is the latest documentary available on Hare’s website or The Inside Job on dvd
no, not at all. The simplest explanation is the ‘me’ generation of entitlement.
Also, criminals know that when sentenced generally all they’ll receive is a stern lecture (along the lines of “You’ve been a bad boy Johnny, don’t do it again”) and community service.
I pretty much doubt your American colleagues would have used the colloquialism “buggers”.
Just sayin’.
He probably cleaned it up a little sdog. I have a feeling the comment probably had an f-bomb instead of the colloquial Aussie word used.
I’ve heard the same sentiment expressed by min’s collegues from many sources within the law enforcement community over the last 10 years; the tone of the comment was often one of exasperation.