Isegoria

The UK has a drinking problem:

The U.K.’s problem is especially striking because of the contrast to what’s been happening in many other industrialized nations. Per-capita consumption of alcohol in the U.K. rose 19% between 1980 and 2007, compared with a 13% decline for all 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to the most recent data. Average consumption over that period fell by about 17% in the U.S., 24% in Canada, 30% in Germany and 33% in France, according to the OECD.

David Jernigan, an alcohol expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says higher alcohol taxes and restrictions on marketing have contributed to the declines in many nations. But in the U.K., he says, longer hours for pubs, cheap supermarket booze and the advent of “alcopops”—premixed cocktails favored by young drinkers—have pushed numbers in the other direction.

In Cardiff, the toll on a recent Friday night suggested the scope of the problem. Police and paramedics responded to numerous reports of assault or injury, including drunken revelers tumbling down stairs and a young woman punching two police officers. The city’s main drinking streets were littered with trash and empty bottles. Alleys and doorways reeked of urine.

An employee of one pub found a young woman lying on the sidewalk, vomiting and shivering in a red cocktail dress. Chris Williams, a volunteer “street pastor” who helps Cardiff cope with its night-life casualties, wrapped the woman in a foil blanket and helped her to a bench. Using the ill woman’s cellphone, she called a number marked “Mum” and waited until her mother came.

The average Briton 15 and older drinks the equivalent of about 11.2 liters (about three gallons) of pure alcohol a year, compared with the OECD average of 9.7 liters, and 8.6 liters in the U.S. Over one-quarter of England’s population is “drinking at hazardous levels,” according to a recent report by the Royal College of Physicians and the National Health Service Confederation. The report said treating alcohol-related conditions cost the state-run health service about £2.7 billion (about $4 billion) in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2007, almost double the cost in 2001.

Alan Campbell, a minister in charge of crime reduction for the U.K.’s Home Office, says the ministry has taken various steps to combat alcohol-related problems, including cracking down on stores that sell booze to minors, hauling parents of underage drinkers into court, and financing advertisements that mock the sloppy behavior of binge drinkers.

Health experts say the availability of cheap alcohol is a major factor. U.K. supermarkets have long sold alcohol at a steep discount or even a loss to attract customers, and some market researchers say discounting appears to have intensified during the recession. Low prices, in turn, have prompted some pubs and clubs to cut drink prices and offer promotions including “all you can drink” specials.

You’ll notice that there’s little or no mention of holding drunks accountable for their behavior.

If, for some reason, you don’t think it’s possible to arrest drunks for assault, public urination, etc., at least you can tax alcohol, right? Naturally that’s not quite the policy recommendation in play:

Last year, Britain’s chief medical adviser, Liam Donaldson, said the country should enforce a minimum price for alcohol, warning that “cheap alcohol is killing us as never before.”

Some alcoholic-beverage companies and supermarkets oppose the idea. Paul Walsh, chief executive of liquor company Diageo PLC, says the government has “enough to focus on and should not be fiddling around with this.” Adds Krishan Rama, spokesman for the British Retail Consortium: “We don’t think minimum pricing is the answer. We think education and changing cultural attitudes would make a much bigger difference.”

Some pubs say they’re fed up with supermarkets’ rock-bottom prices and would welcome minimum-price legislation.

“We find a lot of people will go and spend £10 on three bottles of wine before they come out on a Friday and Saturday night, so they’re already well on their way to being absolutely plastered before they’ve even stepped in your door,” says Cardiff pub manager Rebecca How. “I think most publicans and licensing bodies as well would probably support setting a minimum price for a unit of alcohol.”

Notice how ludicrous the countermeasures have become:

U.K. towns and regions also are taking action. Blackpool has mandated the use of plastic cups on weekend nights at pubs, to cut down on accidental cuts and “glassings,” in which pint glasses are used as weapons. There are 87,000 “glass attacks” in the U.K. each year, according to the Home Office. Police in the city of Hull fine disorderly drinkers, photographing them and collecting their cellphone numbers.

Cardiff has mounted one of the most comprehensive responses, stepping up scrutiny of irresponsible pubs, parking ambulances on the busiest drinking streets and closing them off to traffic, and hiring extra city workers to maintain an orderly taxi line for drinkers trying to get home. Recently, city officials took the unusual step of refusing supermarket giants Tesco PLC and J Sainsbury PLC licenses to sell alcohol at new branches in the city center, telling them there already was too much alcohol sloshing around.

Rather than put drunks in prison for assault with a deadly weapon, mandate plastic cups. Rather than hold drunks responsible for their behavior, refuse Tesco a liquor license. Another example:

Police and city officials set up a “traffic-light” system for cracking down on pub violence. They tally assaults and other disturbances at each bar and assign points for each incident. If a pub or club accumulates a certain number of points over a six-month period, it enters a “red” zone, and police assign it a plan for improvement, including switching to plastic cups and adding extra closed-circuit television cameras and bouncers.

Pubs that don’t comply or that fail to improve could lose their liquor licenses, says Trevor Jones, a police officer who helped create the program.

Closed-circuit TV cameras? That’s the answer to everything, apparently. Notice the complete naiveté concerning moral hazard:

Ms. Williams and her fellow Street Pastors, a Christian volunteer group, have been helping manage alcohol-related problems in Cardiff for 18 months or so. The volunteers, clad in blue parkas and baseball caps marked with the Street Pastor logo, walk the main drinking streets in pairs, looking for people to help.

That same Friday, Ms. Williams and her partner saw a young man being kicked out of a club because he was drunk and stumbling. They helped him walk to the nearest cash machine to withdraw money, then gave him water to try to sober him up before putting him in a cab.

Around 2:30 that morning, they came across a common after-hours sight: a woman walking barefoot because she was having trouble walking in her high heels. Ms. Williams handed the woman a free pair of flip-flops. “By that time of night you have urine and glass on the street,” she says.

I wasn’t familiar with David Mills, the journalist and TV writer, before he recently passed away due to a brain aneurysm, but a passing reference brought me to his Undercover Black Man blog and led me from the Giant Negro scare of a century ago to another historical post, on the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry for the Ku Klux Klan:

The current Encyclopedia Britannica describes the Klan as “either of two distinct secret terrorist organizations in the United States, one founded immediately after the Civil War…, the other beginning in 1915…”

But the word “terrorist” wasn’t used in the 1911 edition. To say the least. Here is how the 1911 entry begins:

“KU KLUX KLAN, the name of an American secret association of Southern whites united for self-protection and to oppose the Reconstruction measures of the United States Congress, 1865-1876.”

The past is a foreign country.

The original article mentions that the Klan’s rituals and costumes — which included weird masks, not just hoods — had a great influence over the lawless but superstitious blacks, which leads Edshugeo to comment:

I remember seeing a scene from Birth Of A Nation in some documentary (that illustrated the above point) and immediately thinking of Batman’s “criminals are a superstitious lot” moment.

I think Bob Kane was Jewish, so he wasn’t trying to glorify the Klan or anything. Just saw a decent idea and ran with it.

Not related to the above, but when I hear Ziggy Stardust, the line “when the kids had killed a man, I had to break up the band” recalls something I (think I) read on a newsgroup a while back about the Klan being founded by a Freemason who disbanded the group when they got too violent.

I love Batman and David Bowie, but sometimes they remind me of the Klan.

Probably no one has coined as many memorable phrases about belief as G.K. Chesterton, Richard Fernandez says:

His key insight was to observe that “human nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind”. Hope is like a drug which humanity can’t survive without. Therefore hope — and the faith that it will be fulfilled –  is “as dangerous as fire.” The wisest treat it with caution because it can be twisted into a noose around their necks; but the most careless of humanity imagine themselves above it and fall into it more completely than those who see it from what it is. Chesterton wrote that “the modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas.”

The history of secularization can be understood not as a replacement of belief by reason, but an exchange of one belief for another. The traditional monotheisms were hustled out of the way so that they could sell Lenin in the place left vacant by Jesus. Perhaps no other century has seen more god-men than the 20th. Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Nicolae Ceau?escu, Saparmurat Niyazov, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il-Sung, Ayatollah Khomeini, Sukarno, and Kim Jong-Il promoted a cult of personality.  And there’s a reason for that. The dictators could only sell the box of matches with their likeness on the cover if they could darken the sun of faith. “During the peak of their regimes, these leaders were presented as god-like and infallible. Their portraits were hung in homes and public buildings, with artists and poets legally required to produce only works that glorified the leader.” Maybe Chesterton was right when he predicted that “the first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.”

But that hardly solves the problem. Caught between the need to believe and the danger of believing, what’s a society to do? For starters, it should be careful.

The most fascinating thing about cults in America, Western Europe and Japan is how ridiculous the objects of their veneration were. In 1973 a convict named Donald Defreeze, having failed to impress his fellow black prisoners, realized that the more educated the dupes, the better.  Cons were allergic to cons. So he did the smart thing, went to Berkeley and he introduced himself as Field Marshal “Cinque” to the white middle class. His prospects improved immediately and DeFreeze proceeded to start the Symbionese Liberation Army, convert Patty Hearst and raise hopes for one tantalizing moment that he was going to lead the Revolution. If gunplay wasn’t your style, James Edward Baker who was the owner of a Sunset Strip health food restaurant before he renamed himself “Father Yod” or “Ya Ho Wa 13? could offer you membership in the Source Family. He led this quintessential cult until he died after stepping off a 1,300 foot cliff in a hanglider he had not learned to fly.

If you were tired of mainline churches, there was David “Mo” Berg of the Children of God whose female followers used sex to attract new adherents into his fold. His conversion rate was said to approach 100%, proof if any were needed, that if there is something more attractive than faith it is faith plus sex. But he was small potatoes besides Jim Jones, the founder of the People’s Temple, who threw socialism and politics into the mix. Jones convinced his followers to establish a “socialist paradise” in the middle of a South American jungle where he persuaded 913 people to drink poisoned Kool-Aid served out of galvanized iron buckets. It was the greatest single loss of civilian American life until September 11. For style, no one could surpass Charles Manson. Manson was the apocalypse, plus murder, plus music all rolled into one. All he left out were the flying saucers. Facile and evil, Manson recruited a coterie of followers called the Family. Hunkered down in a California ranch against the outbreak of Helter-Skelter, a race war he predicted would be triggered by the denial of white women to black men, Manson sent his killers out to Hollywood to butcher his enemies in cinematic horror style.

Nor were the Europeans, even after their experience with Hitler and Stalin, totally immune from the attractions of the dark flame. There was Raelism, founded by a French race car driver, which is described as “the largest UFO religion in the world”. And even in Japan, where you would think the directions up and down were well known, some persons turned to venerating Shoko Asahara. Asahara would impress his devotees by supposedly levitating, a feat apparently achieved by twitching his buttocks and farting, a process reminiscent of the half-propeller, half-jet aircraft drive of the 1950s. Ashara ordered a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995.  People too sophisticated to believe in Jesus may have no trouble believing in Xenu — or Gaia.

David Boaz argues that there never was any golden age of lost liberty in America’s past, because — wait for it — blacks and women did not have the same rights as white men.

I consider his point true, but disingenuous, because no libertarian is arguing for the return of the entirety of 18th-century law and culture; they’d be happy to cut out the incongruities, as I argued to Aretae:

I think it’s a bit disingenuous to attack a nostalgic longing for the liberty of yesteryear by pointing to the un-free elements of the past.

One can attack, say, the privileged Southern aristocracy as dependent on slavery and be largely correct, but the minimalist government of the 18th century did not depend on chattel slavery, women’s limited property rights, etc.; it merely coexisted with them.

The “typical” white male Christian citizen lived in a fairly libertarian world, particularly with respect to the federal government, and the maltreatment of other groups is easy to see as the aberration, not the core, of the system — and these un-free elements were hardly top-down mandates from some tyrant; they were accepted bottom-up elements of the common law.

Where this all gets ugly and awkward is in the transition toward broader acceptance of the rights of former-slaves, women, etc., because that often involves massive transfers of wealth and power, combined with day-to-day life turning upside down.

And I don’t think democracy necessarily smooths that transition.

That last line wasn’t mean to imply that Aretae had said anything with respect to democracy, pro or con, just to point out that when suffrage becomes a right, then the fight over who deserves (any) rights can get ugly:

You wouldn’t, for instance, have to be the least bit bigoted to fear black suffrage in the South during Reconstruction. A new majority with no property and no prospects deciding who gets taxed how much and how those tax dollars get spent?

Anyway, I don’t think the orthodox libertarian position points to the Antebellum or Reconstruction Deep South as its Golden Age, but to, say, Pennsylvania and New York — and the frontier West, of course, where there’s that pesky issue of Indian Wars, which the common man on the frontier wanted won right quick.