Pathology Dressed As Politics

Scoops
Haven’t seen Soylent Green in a while – what happens after everyone finds out? I mean, there’s still not enough food in Ehrlichtenstein, right? Does the cannibalism just become more laissez-faire? Free-range people vs that awful factory farm human parts, etc.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the Pacific, other people aren’t too impressed by communism.

But it’s something; something in a land mostly of nothing.
Meh, in a union of 50 states a handful are bound to go full Venezuela. Voting, U-haul rentals, and speech are all more-or-less legal in Oregon. Handguns and ammunition are as well. Though you feel for the saner residents, of course, it’s simply the people getting what they want good and hard.

When I looked at the talk page for the Antifa Wikipedia entry today, there was strong resistance to adding anything at all on this incident, on the grounds that it was too recent. Not something that seems to concern them in other areas.
One chap suggested, in the course of explaining that the cement milkshake story needed to be verified, that it might be an attempt to boost sales of Portland cement. It was also claimed that an article from the Spectator website (the Speccie being one of the oldest magazines in the English speaking world) was not an appropriate source because it was just a blog.*
*Ok, it was by Toby Young. But still.

Dare we hope?
[Predicted] Mayor Wheeler’s response to Ted Cruz:
“Senator, you represent Texas, not Oregon, so mind your own business and stay out of ours.”

…you think the federal government should not have taken steps to end Jim Crow?
The presumed social sin of racism does not equate to giving a state over to actual violent chaos, including against existing local, state, and federal law. I’d like to hear the anti-federalist argument that can yet constitutionally justify central overreach involving social, state’s rights issues.

I should have cited how those state governments allowed the KKK to operate with impunity, committing numerous acts of terrorism and murder.
At which point we could both have also cited that the whole spectrum of assault all the way through murder is quite illegal and has been for some time. Locally and regardless of motive.
By the anti-Jim Crow method apparently we defer instead to a federal thought law that ultimately but hopefully affects some degree of material state crime.
Cruz appears to have raised a valid point for consideration: that Oregon is no longer able to police itself, the result not of what X thinks of Y’s opinion of Z’s melatonin – see: ANTIFA – but the simple fact somebody’s going to be killed while local law enforcement and its protect-and-serve mandate has been officially sidelined.
There are real, negative rights like the one to life, and then there are circuitous, over-reaching prohibitions from afar on what is only tacitly tied to ultimate local acts.

I would say “no longer willing”.
The precedent is Eisenhower federalizing the Arkansas National Guard and sending in elements of the 101st to enforce segregation of Central High as I am reasonably sure the governor (who has a certificate in women’s studies) isn’t about to send the ORARNG in to sort out Portland.

The presumed social sin of racism does not equate to giving a state over to actual violent chaos
Except Jim Crow laws weren’t social sins but actual negation of individual rights, not JUST of blacks but of whites. It was law that forbid voluntary associations between citizens. It wasn’t that it allowed certain business owners to keep out blacks, but it also compelled other business owners to keep out blacks that they wished to do business with. And there were other aspects of government treating blacks differently than whites. Also a violation of basic Constitutional rights.
When the local government acts illegally in a manner that harms the Constitutional rights of its citizens, Federal jurisdiction is called for.
t we could both have also cited that the whole spectrum of assault all the way through murder is quite illegal and has been for some time. Locally and regardless of motive.
Specious as we are not talking about crimes where the local government actually attempts to use it’s police powers to identify and bring to justice the perps of such crime, regardless of the melanin or motive … but where the government is an accomplice in crime by enabling the perps to commit crime against others with impunity.

Darleen, Jim Crow was a post-Civil War measure. Brown was in 1954 and federal civil rights, such as became under that rhetorical umbrella, were ten years later. The assertion that federally prohibiting prior state-level social acts morally or structurally addresses assault and murder is unfounded. Up until that time it wasn’t constitutional either (and federalism remains at least something of a principle even today in a land both partisan camps gave over to collectivism long ago).
You need a lot of weight to justify any federal morality but virtually none to reapply prior constitutional law and order in a lawless, violent American state. Tying Jim Crow to lynching is like tying public assembly to Andy Ngo’s assault, and tying either to a federal act aimed at preventing state-level crime is as structurally faulty as it is procedurally dangerous. Elevating assembly to such a level actually protects ANTIFA, by the way, and probably leads to enabling incidents like Ngo. I’m guessing Soros would know. I’m also wagering that post-civil war segregation was originally pragmatic and only later was reinvented as oppression.
But the right has become reactionary. It’s racing the left to reclaim various contemporary social virtues, having first given up so many structural issues and their original, federalist, constitutional ethics. Justifying more arbitrary federal acts in one instance potentially does so in all, and they all eventually come at a cost.
So it’s not specious at all. Crime has a definition and as such, also a proper level of legal procedure and with it, an ethical motive and constitutional framework. Portland is only a potential federal issue justifiably when it descends into mortal chaos, not when thugs need to be prevented from, in your example, either speech or assembly in order to save a Ngo and in the process uphold a broader, detached constitutional element.

For a change, some non-American nuttiness:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7196679/LIZ-JONES-goes-inside-Gwyneth-Paltrows-Goop-wellness-festival.html?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark
(Hat tip Ace)

And if there was ever a group for whom the term Moral Licensing was coined…
It’s worth noting that at Berkeley in 2017, Antifa and their cheerleaders were starting fires, smashing windows and assaulting random women. One of whom had committed the sin of wearing a Bitcoin hat.
Berkeley’s leftist faculty were of course titillated and predictably dishonest.
While the moral colossus Laurie Penny, who was watching from yards away, was busy telling us how brave she is… for talking to conservative students. Because unlike the masked far-left rioters – the ones opportunistically beating strangers with metal bars and gleefully punching women – and whose actions Laurie carefully ignored – conservative students are “vicious and vengeful.” And she’s “fucking terrified of them.”
This is the warped mental landscape in which Antifa thrive.

It is true that Portland police have no duty to protect anyone. But once they protect anyone, they can’t selectively deny protection to victims of a left-leaning group like Antifa. Such ideological discrimination is forbidden.
If this is the free-standing summary of our many Portlands it becomes a lovely bit of ideological sophistry if it again unhooks serious local crime from immediate law and opens the door for yet more federal philosophizing, including in the aftermath of SCOTUS making local enforcement optional. The writer should be clearer in making the distinction between criminal and civil. At any rate attempted murder is not an optional crime.

Honk honk!
And just to be clear, Laurie wasn’t saying she was worried that being anywhere near conservative students, the ones being besieged and assaulted, might also make her a target for assault by her leftist compadres. She couldn’t admit that. Instead, she was hyperventilating because conservative students are inherently “vicious and vengeful.” They just are, apparently.
At the time, all tweeted live, it was a thing to behold. There she was, announcing her bravery for daring to associate, briefly, with college Republicans and other conservative students, none of whom were reported as doing anything hostile or untoward to their red-haired visitor, while adjacent buildings were being smashed and set on fire by her fellow lefties, whose recreational thuggery was deemed unworthy of criticism, or indeed acknowledgement, at least by Laurie.
The extent to which leftism entails displacement and projection, and a pathological unrealism, is, even now, quite striking.

1893: George “Bugs” Moran who thanklessly headed Chicago’s North Side Gang was born. For his efforts battling Al Capone, seven of his gang members were gunned down (Bugs slept in that day) and he never fully recovered his underworld powers. He eventually left the area, quitting the gang entirely and reverting to petty crime such as mail fraud and robbery.

A rather dazed Andy Ngo talks about being assaulted.

It’s as if the movie Inherit the Wind had a different ending
And so we’ve gone from “The aboriginal population is primitive and unable to think rationally about things,” which is a sentiment to be denounced, and progressed to “We must treat the aboriginal population as if it were primitive and unable to think rationally about things.” Which, apparently, is something to be applauded.

During the Civil Rights Era, the Supreme Court used the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to force hotels to admit everyone regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin.
They need to apply the same principle to the Bill of Rights, when its employees are not allowed to talk to the press about anything:
“It should be noted that Zoe, who asked not to be identified by her real name because she was not authorized by her employer to speak to the press …”

“The Proud Boys did it”.
It was a weather balloon.

…meant to refer to antisocial personality disorder…
I was thinking of the extremely polarised thinking, impulse control issues, wildly disproportionate anger, emotional bullying and manipulation, needing to cow others, etc., all of which seem commonplace at Antifa gatherings. In hindsight, antisocial personality disorder would be more apposite for some. That said, I’d be amazed if Antifa’s demographic didn’t include a remarkably high concentration of all cluster B disorders. It’s pretty much a signature.

Antifa personality disorder

the morally ludicrous Laurie Penny.
That. 😀

Antifa certainly don’t hate Jews, indeed very many Jews support them but they’re absolutely not nazis:
To quote the inimitable Douglas Adams, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.

…that these antifuck scum had been planning to disrupt bike week at Sturgis.
Oh yeah, oh Hell yeah! I’d pay upwards of $50 for Pay-Per-View for that one.

A couple of years ago, I recalled this chap, and predicted to myself what would eventually happen:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-01/man-who-bravely-fought-islamic-terrorists-put-terror-watchlist-uk-govt