Kids Behaving Badly

A history lesson stretching from just after the defeat of Napoleon to the present day:

There was a time when the most powerful curb on bad behaviour was the shame that attached to being upbraided by a police officer or an adult. That stigma has gone, along with any deference young people once felt to the older generation or people in authority...

It's worth reading the whole piece, just as this is:

What we are living through is nothing other than the death throes of 20th-century ideology: the idea that the state is the only repository of civic virtue and moral authority.

-- Nick