Mark Steyn has some thoughts on "Rude Britannia" and what the continuing recessional of that once great nation bodes for the rest of the Western world:

Once it's no longer accepted that something is wrong all the laws in the world will avail you nought. The law functions as formal expression of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it. Last year, on a trolley car in London, a 96-year-old man was punched in the face and blinded in one eye. His 44-year- old attacker had boarded the crowded tram, tried to push past Mr. Chaudhury in the aisle and become enraged by the nonagenarian's insufficient haste in moving out of the way. "You bastard!" he snarled, and slugged him. A month ago, Stephen Gordon was sentenced by Croydon Crown Court to three years' probation, which means he'll have to endure weekly chit-chats with a municipal functionary, assuming he bothers turning up for his appointments. Mr. Gordon was seen to smirk as he left court, notwithstanding the mental health issues entered in mitigation.

Much of the commentary concerned the leniency of the sentence. But consider George Jonas's dictum: beating up a 96-year-old isn't wrong because it's illegal; it's illegal because it's wrong. And, if a citizen of an advanced Western social democracy no longer knows it's wrong, the laws are unlikely to prove much restraint. British society has come to depend on CCTVs — closed-circuit cameras in every public building, every shopping centre, every street, even (in some remote rural locales) on the trees. According to Theodore Dalrymple, England's greatest living pessimist, the British are second only to the North Koreans as the most monitored population on the planet; Britain is said to be home to a third of all the world's CCTVs; in the course of an average day, the average Briton is estimated to be filmed approximately 300 times. Etc. So naturally the Croydon trolley had a camera, and it captured in vivid close-up the perpetrator attacking his victim. And a fat lot of good the video evidence did Mr. Chaudhury.

Look at it from the attacker's point of view: why not beat up old people? Let's face it, they're a pain in the neck, clogging up escalators, revolving doors, sidewalks. You're in a hurry, you've got places to go, people to see, and there's always some old coot or withered biddy shuffling, shuffling, shuffling in front of you at 10 paces an hour. In Britain, in Canada, in Europe, in Japan, in China, the population is aging fast. So, if you think there are too many codgers taking 20 minutes to board the bus right now, just wait a couple of decades. Suppose five per cent of young men get irked at being delayed by geezers. What restrains them from making grampa-whacking merely the latest normalized pathology? A functioning civilization is like an iceberg: the unseen seven-eighths of codes and assumptions is the accumulated inheritance, the wisdom of the ages. Once it's gone, what's left just bobs around on the surface. Take a walk round any downtown or suburban mall and see it as Mr. Chaudhury's attacker did: what's to stop you?

Meanwhile closer to home (much closer to home for me), Clayton Cramer explores "What's Gone Wrong In Oakland."

And with stories such as these, is it any wonder that, as Jeffrey Bell notes, social conservatism is far from dead (at least in the States) as a counterbalancing force?