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A really great way for the police to make people uneasy

· Sui generis

Truth in advertising?

November 4th, 2017 |

11 comments to A really great way for the police to make people uneasy

  • Paul Marks
    November 4, 2017 at 2:18 pm

    Before the Act of 1856 (at least I think it was 1856) government police forces were not compulsory in English and Welsh counties – I do not believe we were eating each other before then.

    And before the 1870s there were no public prosecutions (in England and Wales) unless the offence was against the Crown – this did not mean that robbers, murderers and rapists did not get prosecuted.

    The Edwin Chadwick (Jeremy Bentham) view of everything (basically “first there was darkness and then THE STATE moved in the darkness and said let-there-be-light!”) is wrong.

    And, no, I am not an anarchist – I just think this look-to-the-state-for-everything doctrine leads to the situation that the photograph in the post (unintentionally) shows.

  • Perry de Havilland (London)
    November 4, 2017 at 2:36 pm

    During communism, this place was were people with incorrect opinions were taken into the basement for ‘adjustment’.

  • Jay Thomas
    November 4, 2017 at 5:26 pm

    Perry De Havilland. Do you have any idea from when the facade of the building dates?

  • Alisa
    November 4, 2017 at 5:54 pm

    Where is it?

  • Perry de Havilland (London)
    November 4, 2017 at 5:58 pm

    Alisa: Bratislava, where I am currently

  • Bruce
    November 5, 2017 at 5:22 am

    All hail the Napoleonic Code, peasants!!

  • Patrick Crozier
    November 5, 2017 at 11:14 am

    Echoing what Paul said, even as recently as a hundred years ago when newspapers referred to the “prosecutor” in a criminal case they meant the victim.

  • Paul Marks
    November 5, 2017 at 1:28 pm

    Yes Patrick – or someone prosecuting on behalf of the victim (for example in a murder case).

    The difficulty is that such a political and legal order can not endure when its philosophical foundations are undermined. The establishment elite gradually rejected the “Old Whig” philosophical beliefs of such thinkers as Ralph Cudworth, Thomas Reid and Edmund Burke (indeed the Victorians tried to reinterpret Burke as a utilitarian – whose only objection to bigger government “Social Reform” was that it should be done in a gradual and orderly way, both this Victorian philosophical and this Victorian political point about Edmund Burke is FALSE), replacing them with the philosophical ideas of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and Jeremy Bentham.

    One can NOT get to the politics of the Bill of Rights (British or American) from the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and Jeremy Bentham. John Stuart Mill tried desperately to create a new philosophical case for political liberty that did NOT depend on the old philosophical principles (such things as human moral agency – free will, the soul, and also universal and objective Natural Law), but as James McCosh pointed out at the time – the effort of J.S. Mill to build a new philosophical foundation for liberty FAILS.

    Contra to such writers as the late F.A. Hayek – if the philosophical principles of the “Old Whigs” (philosophical principles they actually shared with such Tory folk as Dr Johnson – there is a vast philosophical divide between the Aristotelian Dr Johnson and his “fellow Tory” David Hume) are rejected, then the political principles of the “Old Whigs” eventually also go.

  • James Hargrave
    November 6, 2017 at 5:02 pm

    No, de Havilland, you are in Presporok (or Pressburg, as a café outside the rather grim railway station will remind you).

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