Bill's Comments

This post in Belmont Club in the last two paragraphs shows exactly what is wrong in the world today. A murder in Great Britain is current events writ small. Here are the paragraphs:

The aesthetics of the jungle and of civilized society are as different as night and day. In jails and raw slums, what is deadly is beautiful. In settings “red of tooth and claw”, having long teeth and sharp claws are the ultimate fashion accessory. By contrast, the aesthetics of civilization are often pointedly impractical: high heels, shoes with pointy toes, constricting pants, jangling rings, vestigial pockets, fragile clothes are but a few examples. The aesthetics of civilization are based on the conspicuous consumption of safety. Over time, some societies forget that safety is not a natural condition, but a hard won commodity. They begin to think it is as free as the air and are outraged when they cannot have it on demand. Eventually they evolve into cultures where nobody can see the harm in releasing Jihadis into general population; where possessing a gun for home defense offends those who are aware of it; when the proper response to violent crime is sympathy and when mass murder is met by abject apologies from the victims.

The sad fact is that when French students Gabriel Ferez and Laurent Bonomo encountered Dano Sonnex and Nigel Farmer, in that lawless context Sonnex and Farmer were functionally the more beautiful. When the jungle and civilization meet, the jungle wins unless the civilized man is armed and able. But maybe nobody remembers that any more.