Open Letter to Salient (a student newspaper)
-- edited.
Your interview with Professor John Pratt (September 2003) revealed
the loose thinking that you get from Left-Wing ideologues at universities.
He explained Tony Ryall's criticism of "ivory tower academics"
as
anti-intellectualism. This is a self-serving misunderstanding. The point
is that academics --
having lots of power to fail students but no one (in practice) to whom
they are answerable when they abuse their
power -- routinely pass off Left-Wing prejudice as intelligent thought.
I, for one, would certainly not
characterise Victoria University's Criminology staff as "intellectuals"!
Professor Pratt quoted his colleague Jan Jordan
as saying that politicians such as Ryall had been
wrong to focus on crime at the last election, since the murder rate
had remained steady. However,
on the page http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/PA0205/S00562.htm
you can see that Tony Ryall on 23
May 2002 referred not to murder rates but to "bashings and thuggery".
Irrespective of whether crime rates are going up or not, however, any
level of crime is a legitimate cause
for concern. The public's level of concern may well be a result of the
amount of crime-reporting that
surfaces in the media, but that does not invalidate the public's concern,
either. Arguably, one cause of the
increased crime since the 1960's has been the break-up of the traditional
family, with step-parents
and step-children unable or unwilling to have the same non-sexual and
disciplined relationship with one another that real parents and real
offspring generally have. The break-up of the traditional family, in
turn, is
the result of the Sexual Revolution and of Feminism's brainwashing of
women out of the home and into
the workforce -- where temptations to new relationships abound. Without
even looking at the
relevant webpages, I can be certain that Victoria University's Left-Wing
ideologues will not have
researched those sorts of topics -- in case they got the "wrong"
results, from their pro-Feminist
perspective,
Pratt mentions public concerns about crime rates and soft sentences,
but offers no solutions.
Instead, he says that high rates of imprisonment are "worrying".
That change of topic -- from the
evaluating the problem to criticising what is usually considered to
be the solution -- is irresponsible. The most important issue is obviously
the crime rate. Members of the public feel that the solution is deterrence
and prevention by means of longer sentences. Almost no one at University
dares to challenge bullying Feminazis by researching the causative role
of Feminism in crime, which might lead to a more realistic solution.
Inevitably, the need for a solution must take priority over Pratt's
worries about imprisonment rates.
Pratt falls back on calling New Zealand a "modern, democratic,
liberal society that values freedom
and liberty" as an argument against imprisoning people, but those
platitudes cut no ice.
Present-day countries are always "modern", by definition.
Nazi Germany was also "modern" in 1940.
Also, it is patently ridiculous to say that freedom and liberty should
be extended to criminals. Moreover,
I don't agree that New Zealand is democratic and liberal, since most
politically relevant information is controlled
by the unelected, Leftist MUC (Media University Complex), of which Professor
Pratt's own university is a particularly totalitarian part. A Leftist
lecturer has complete freedom to brainwash her students and force them
to regurgitate her propaganda at exam-time, for example. Those students
then go on to apply the results of the brainwashing in their careers.
