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Pondering the most socially & politically powerful tropes and memes (social constructs – please see R Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene (you what?),” 1976) of the crazy-arsed 1880’s City of London we may stumble back some decades down a handy if proverbial Memory Lane to our secondary school studies..

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So here lay the psycho-cultural (mental) foundation of the SA Law Society’s grandiose and socio-economically devastating Theory of Diminished Responsibility:

“In traditional literature a tragic hero is utterly vicious but in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard is not the..

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“typical tragic man, he’s tragic hero.. impulsive, arrogant & honest, ambitious at the same time.. moral value supported his control over his wife, dau. & lover”

Fark

“..a kind of mysterious & unavoidable power, character, fate, deeply..”.

R Brown 1966.

Enough already.

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The journalist’s particular ‘roman à thèse’ begins with a drunk dude selling his missus. His brand was in my opinion simple-mindedly socially engineered to counterpoint Cobbet’s epochal socio-economic critique of the brutal early industrial Peterloo Massacre era, Rural Rides, 80yrs before.

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Roman à thèse
1) A NOVEL WITH A PURPOSE, Nicholas Wilson Pulteney Grammar School Adelaide re “Tess of the Durbervilles”,” a rape & impregnation by a toff story
2) ‘a “thesis novel,” a didactic novel that puts fwd an argument or proposes a solution to some problem of politics, morality, or philosophy @Wickipedia 3) A Roman à thèse (French: ‘thesis novel’) is a novel which is didactic or which expounds a theory. Scholar Susan Suleiman talked about “authoritarian fiction”

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Reverse Diminished Responsibility: #Fascists demand cops “profile” Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander ppl (or if they behave nicely & do cultural activities & stuff give them bags of💰), vulnerable young women, ethnic minority group members, @Greens or ANYONE fighting corruption

John, and thanks to 1) all thoughtful souls in an anarchic morally-rudderless era of post-truth policy chaos, dysregulated extractive market economism and the directly resultant mental confusion and depressive illness in all age groups, especially young people regimented, harried, emotionally bludgeoned, dumbed down, medicalised, made ill and even killed off for Christ’s supposedly loving sake for the fiscal benefit of psycho-emotionally deranged racist. fascist, misogynist all-round misanthropes & self loathers, multi-millionaire quacks and surgeons

2) Christine Fourner @assoc1counsel Vancouver BC 🇨🇦

Footnote

Thinking of Victorian English law, here’s Julian Barnes’ valuable social document.. perhaps, or arguably, Edmund Burke’s ‘just prejudice’ meets reverse Diminished Responsibility.

‘Set at the turn of the 20th century, the story follows the separate but intersecting lives of two very different British men: a half-Indian solicitor and son of a vicar, George Edalji, and the world-famous author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Roughly one-third of the book traces the story of Edalji’s trial, conviction, and imprisonment for a crime he did not commit. About one-third of the book traces the story of Doyle’s life and his relationships with his first wife Louisa Hawkins and his platonic lover Jean Leckie. Roughly one-third of the book concerns Doyle’s attempt to clear the name of Edalji and uncover the true culprit of the crime. Julian Barnes called it “a contemporary novel set in the past” and the book does not aim to stick closely to the historical record at every point.’