Appropo of my post on Prop 9 and crime, here’s what I do not want California to become:
In Britain, there is a long and honorable tradition of local councils’ leasing small plots of land, called allotments, to people without gardens of their own who may grow fruit, vegetables, and flowers upon them. The tenants also receive small sheds on their plots for storing tools, fertilizers, garden furniture, and so forth. Unfortunately, another, less honorable, tradition has recently developed: stealing from allotments. Seventeen of the 50 allotments in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire have been robbed recently, for example, and the shed of one tenant, Bill Malcolm, has been broken into three times.
So Malcolm put a barbed-wire fence around his patch of land to discourage further depredations. The fence, however, did not meet with the approval of the local council, which worried about the risk of injury – to future burglars. Injured burglars might then sue the council. Another council, in Bristol, told allotment holders not to lock their sheds, in case burglars damaged them while breaking into them.
…from City Journal
How does Britain still function?
I don’t think any place in the US, including California, is close to getting this type of lunacy put into law.
#1 from GK:
bq. _”How does Britain still function?”_
It functions due to the large parts of it that aren’t London.
Okay, so how does London function?
I was there two years ago on my way to Iraq, and it seemed to function just fine. Sometimes I do wonder how.
UK sounds a lot like the US in the 1970s. Got to treat them criminals right!
AL: …here’s what I do not want California to become….
When it comes to crime, the chances of California becoming anything like Worcestershire are very slim indeed. Did it cross your mind that a strand of barbed wire three feet above ground level is rather dangerous to small children without being much of a deterrent to thieves?
To Kevin #5-
Protect the Criminals. It’s for teh Children!!!!!
California has already become what has been dubbed Anarcho-Terrorism.
Real violent, dangerous, and politically correct criminals (protected groups, with electoral clout and PC status) are left to do what they do unchecked.
While middle class people are fined for wrong trash in the wrong bins. Or their sons calling a playmate a name at age 9 or so.
This is already here.
This kind of idiocy is rampant in England- I have read dozens and dozens of cases with the same sort of flavor- Heroic rescues where the rescuers were punished because some obscure rule was not followed, victims of assaults punished for defending themselves from criminals, home owners improving their property under attack by the councils, etc ad infinitem. Orwell was prescient.
Wow, they’re concerned about the criminals. Ughh hello, they’re breaking and entering. This is exactly the type of soft crime that the Ivy-League Illuminati politicians are fighting for Congress to pass. If they get it, we’ll be the criminals, and the criminals will be the victims.