Just Like You
Speaking of crime and punishment, here’s a thread on prison and recidivism.
In short, we’re told – by a civil rights lawyer who claims that “cops and prisons are killing us all” – that neither custodial sanctions nor more lenient attempts at correction have much impact on rates of reoffending. This is then presented, by the same lawyer, as a reason not to imprison the predatory and murderous, who are apparently deserving of our sympathy. Unlike, one assumes, their numerous victims, and future victims.
And so, we arrive at the strange logic that if a person has been arrested many times for behaving like an animal, many times, and has consequently, belatedly, ended up in prison, thereby allowing the law-abiding some relief from his predation, then this is a bad thing. For which, we, not he, should feel bad.
As noted in the discussion, there’s a reliance, not least among progressives, on the notions of deterrence and rehabilitation as being how one determines whether prison is fitting or effective, or even an obsolete institution, something to abolish. But an antisocial moron with poor impulse control is likely to remain so until he dies, or is killed while engaging in criminal activity.
The concepts of punishment and incapacitation – of stopping a monster’s sociopathic activity and sparing others violation and misery, if only for the duration of his imprisonment – don’t seem to figure highly in progressive circles. Where, as we’ve seen, all kinds of contortions are very much in fashion.
Among the replies and linked tangents are some common, if unconvincing, suppositions. For instance, that habitual violent criminals – say, the kinds of creatures who gleefully sucker-punch elderly women because they happen to be of East Asian descent – will somehow be morally redeemed by “affordable housing” and “access to healthcare.”
Oh, and more “theatre” for schoolchildren.
Update, via the comments, where Darleen adds,
In reply to which, pst314 quotes Theodore Dalrymple:
Dalrymple: “Ah, but it does me good.”
Prisoner: “What do you mean?”
Dalrymple: “When you are in prison you are not burgling my home.”
At which point, readers may register that the limited effect of imprisonment – and lenient alternatives – on rates of reoffending could be construed in ways that, shall we say, diverge from progressive orthodoxy. One might, for instance, infer that those incarcerated for serious criminal savagery – and who, on release, continue being criminal savages – are irredeemable, and therefore undeserving of pretentious sympathy. One might even infer that the wellbeing of such creatures is no longer a concern.
This this morning at Ace…Granted, it’s Black Lives Matter Rhode Island, which is probably about as significant as BLM Alaska…but still…this guy actually comes across as fairly rational. I would not doubt he’s a opportunist to some degree but opportunists see opportunities and opportunities are there for a reason.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/08/exclusive-black-lives-matter-leader-stands-solidarity-j6/
“There ain’t nothing you can do”,
rooftop Koreansbroomstick Sikhs didn’t get the message.The instant karma to the sheer arrogance of the progressive shopper – he even brought his own cart! – was quite satisfying. I know, double plus ungood wrongthink, report for regrooving.
But first, let me watch it again…
And since we are over 100 comments…this is rather funny. In an unintended kinda way.
Jailed in the Bastille for stealing a loaf of bread for their starving sister
Argh, I only got a few paragraphs in and I want to throw my computer from the window. No one can be this stupid … video after video of smash-and-grab, or people rolling into stores with bags and empty trash bins and crowbars to empty out cases … CASES … of whatever goods can be easily resold are almost ubiquitous on media & social media sites.
And among those who suffer are the poor working class who suddenly find themselves with no stores in their neighborhoods anymore.
This isn’t compassion from this sobsister, this is evil. It turns property rights and what are the legitimate obligations of civilized society and government on its head.
Some store owner should beat Owen with a stick.
Mr Jones seems unaware, or has chosen not to acknowledge, that the majority of shoplifting is not done out of need, but rather for kicks, or status, or for black market resale (including those baby products he mentions). By most estimates, shoplifters are on average caught around 2% of the time, usually after dozens of thefts, and of those apprehended, roughly half are turned over to the police for prosecution.
And that’s before taking into account the recent thieving sprees documented in the Progressive Retail Experience series.
Celebrating a “knockout king”: Do NOT suggest that this is an evil culture.
And that’s before taking into account the recent thieving sprees
In Owen’s little scold he sneers This surge cannot reasonably be attributed to a sudden kleptomania pandemic. I want to understand what he feels is “sudden”? David, you’ve posted on the progressive retail experience for years. And I don’t think that the UK is so much different than the US that you all had a collapse in “sufficiently feeding” your populace while we were busy electing politicians who dedicated themselves to emptying prisons and decriminalizing “lifestyle” crimes.
The weaponization of “compassion” which ignores the reality of who the majority of these criminals are … and it ain’t being deprived of a fresh chopped salad.
DO NOT talk about the culture:
A monument to a crack dealer who became famous by making recordings about being a crack dealer will be unveiled in Downtown Brooklyn.
There is, I think, a widespread reluctance to register just how degenerate human beings can be. Even when the degeneracy is right there, staring back defiantly. Or sharing sadistic and racist ‘prank’ videos on TikTok and Instagram. Or, as seen here, when breaking into one’s home, armed with carving knives.
It’s quite remarkable.
The entire left, from squishy liberals to Maoists, seems unable to recognize evil.
This cannot be said too often: These pundits are evil people. They mean to do us the greatest harm. It doesn’t matter how witty they are at social events, or whether they are right about a few small matters. They are indeed evil, malevolent creatures.
The left sees none as guilty.
Insufficiently so.
On the contrary: The left sees normal people as guilty. Criminality, on the other hand, is evidence of innocence.
Protein Wisdom 2005:
Liberals have no problem with this.
Not recognize evil: on “the first 48” they interview family often to get some idea of what is going on. They often say “he was turning his life around” or “he used to sell drugs, but not anymore” and it turns out he was killed during a drug deal, sometimes on his mom’s driveway or in her house. I am sure that family members love their drug dealing daddy who is generous with his drug cash, but seriously, they don’t know?
As to white apologists, it is pure blindness. They believe in the blank slate–that everyone is simply good unless society mistreats them. They deny incentives–that if crime is easy to commit with few consequences, you will get more of it.
Now they’re stealing medicine for their sickly children…
Ummmm…pardon me if someone has already pointed this out (not all the comments are showing), but don’t they have the Sacred NHS over there?? I mean, free healthcare for all, right? So why do these poor people need to steal meds for their kids when they can just walk in to the NHS and get all the free stuff they could want?
I understand the need for Tory bashing by the lefties, but whoever wrote that stupid article is kinda undermining the Sacred NHS there. I mean – here in the awful USofA, the Oppressed do need to progressively shop the necessaries for their poor sick starving children, and the Evil Republicans probably do want them arrested and tossed in jail. But here, we don’t have a NHS providing free healthcare for all…although Obamacare wants so badly to be that.
/sarc off
The left are masters of doublethink.
Really? Looks fine to me.
[ Schedules tomorrow’s Ephemera, pours drink, heads for sofa. ]
Doubletalk too.
Stealing meds for their sick children: hahahaha no. Here in the US, the poor get medicaid which is free coverage. Also, from the looks of those (ahem) “helping themselves”, they are not stealing children’s tylenol, probably don’t have kids (young black men) or don’t support them if they do. It is lies all the way down.
Really? Looks fine to me.
Sometimes, but not always, the comment bubble and the number of comments under the post headline will say one number, but a fewer number of comments actually show up (fer instance when the number went over 100, there was still only page 1 available to me). But they eventually all show up, so it’s not a complaint. I just wanted to acknowledge that someone may have already made my point.
I haven’t noticed a problem, but then I haven’t been paying much attention to the displayed number.
I just caught a few minutes of an old episode of the comedy-quiz show QI, in which Stephen Fry and his celebrity panellists touched on the ‘3 strikes’ policy with much tutting and condescension.
Viewers were given the impression, quite shamelessly, that otherwise harmless and adorable people were being incarcerated simply for stealing “nine videotapes” or a few boxes of cookies. The assorted luvvies seemed oddly incurious about the rather more serious crimes that must have occurred in order to be given a final warning. Nor did they seem interested in having those who’d been so unjustly incarcerated roaming free in their own neighbourhoods, carjacking their neighbours, or breaking into their homes.
But everyone congratulated themselves on being so lofty and enlightened. Not like those redneck Americans.
Stephen Fry does seem to come off as a very conceited and condescending creature, so much Smarter and Wiser and Thoughtfully Moral than we proles.(Caveat: I’ve only seen him in a few non-dramatic appearances, but that’s the impression I retain.)
See the concept of “the punchable face”, but in this case I don’t so much want to punch him as to read in the news that he’s been mugged by a thug with a long rap sheet.
Note that we are supposed to like and admire Stephen Fry for being so lofty but despise Jeremy Clarkson for being a low-class jerk. But Clarkson comes off as a more genuine person while Fry quite the opposite.
Should I be unsurprised that Stephen Fry is a Cambridge man?
A recurring theme of the series is to show how common assumptions are often wrong or misleading. So there was a certain unintended irony in seeing the left-of-centre politics of the host and panellists being affirmed by an eye-widening omission of facts. An omission that could not plausibly have been an accident.
And so, yes, it’s tempting to imagine how Mr Fry and his self-satisfied peers would fare were their own genteel neighbourhoods subsequently enlivened by the carjackers, armed robbers, and rapists whose punishment they tutted about and deemed excessive. And whose punishment was a result of a refusal to stop behaving like savages.
Indeed. I have noticed that the “skeptics” I have known have virtually all been soft-left to far-left, and they somehow “inexplicably” never got around to debunking leftist shibboleths and lies.
This might possibly throw light upon the culture of Cambridge.
When the series first aired, about 20 years ago, I would happily watch it. Fry can be funny, as can some of the guests. The bien-pensant politics was always there, of course, but it became more prominent, more uniform, and more grating, over time. This political default is seemingly taken for granted by its hosts and almost all of the panellists. In a show about the wrongness of things that are taken for granted.
That seems to be a virtually inevitable trend, as if those people are slowly revealing their true selves and true intentions which they at one time were more careful to conceal.
I remember that too. Here’s the clip if anyone wants to see it (from s7e11). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiaqgFDwOjs
Thanks.
To concentrate exclusively on the assumed triviality of the third strike, in carefully selected examples, rather than the seriousness of the first two, is quite the manoeuvre. As if the refusal to be law-abiding, after repeated warnings, and what might be deduced from that, weren’t useful information.
And I suspect that among the general public, here and overseas, a similar policy might meet with widespread approval, not least among victims of crime. And regardless of whether the crimes in question would be deemed serious by the well-heeled panellists of a BBC quiz show, for whom such predation is largely theoretical.
Thank you!
Perhaps the dishonesty is excused because it’s a comedy quiz show. Here in America we have comedy-political commentators whose dishonesty is routinely excused that way. (“Clown nose on/clown nose off.”)
A recurring theme of the series is to show how common assumptions are often wrong or misleading.
Not the higher common assumptions of Stephen Fry and his chums, but the general knowledge of common people was depicted as low class. The show conditioned its competitors and audience to sniff out when an answer was just too common (common in numbers, common in status). If the common answer is “black”, they should say “white”. It still might not be the right answer, but giving the wrong answer is less shameful than giving the common answer.
This went beyond the quiz show convention that answers have to be surprising to the audience, not the first thing that comes to mind (Which member of the Beatles…? Best bet in real life is John, best bet in a quiz show is George). Fry’s show had something like a Klaxon of Shame which sounded when a competitor blurted out an obvious answer instead of a contrarian one. Shame not because they stumbled in the Simon Says game of not blurting the obvious thing out, but shame because they gave the same answer anyone on the street might have given.
Which betrays a callous indifference to the fates of those who are most often the victims of these predators. It is possible for those who live elsewhere to innocently forget, but it is another thing entirely to be indifferent when reminded.
A guaranteed path to error, given that the common answer is likely to be correct.
Would that Fry could be subjected to a Klaxon of Shame whenever he utters a dishonest “clever” answer.
And how interesting” that Fry and his fellow subversives never get around to the fact that in America blacks commit crimes far more than do whites. (And come to think of it, I believe that most of the “knife crime” in the UK is committed by immigrants, most of whom are African or Middle Eastern or South Asian. Correct?)
and:
That toxic smugness: I recently watched part of a long interview between Jordan Peterson and the comedian Bill Maher. Jordan Peterson discussed the meanings that can be found in the Biblical stories of Sodom and Gomorrah and of Jonah. As Jordan Peterson made his exposition, Bill Maher kept laughing inappropriately. A normal adult human being would have listened in silent seriousness, since it was obvious that Peterson was trying to make some serious points. But no, Bill Maher reflexively displayed the persona that he built his career on, smugly contemptuous of all those “superstitions” that the “common” people embrace.
Parents should know you have to follow through with warnings. Same with thugs and car jackers.
That.
So did Hawk Newsome in 2017.
Which, given the host’s careful sidestepping of certain details, is rather symbolic. Yes, I know, it’s just a comedy quiz show, but in terms of worldview it does suggest something of a gulf between our betters and ourselves. Needless to say, similar examples occurred pretty much weekly, for years. Over time, in fact quite quickly, this tends to erode one’s ability to find a show amusing.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the last Radio 4 comedies I heard, some years ago, was an episode of Loose Ends – a sort of whimsical revue of chat, music and substandard stand-up. The generic left-leaning comedian of the week (whose name I didn’t catch) was pleased by the taboos surrounding immigration and multiculturalism. Lots of code words were used – “Sun-reader,” and so forth – so that the disdain for working-class people and their fears wouldn’t be too overt.
The gist of the comedian’s punch line was, “Isn’t it hilarious that people who have concerns about mass immigration and failures to assimilate – the rapid and alienating transformation of their neighbourhoods – now have to be quiet because otherwise they’ll be called racists and possibly lose their jobs. Ha! We won!”
This triumphal non-joke – and it was blatantly triumphal – was deemed incredibly funny and much mannered clapping ensued.
Of course, this was aired before the uncovering of events in Rotherham and elsewhere, and before our new and vibrant age of Congolese machete gangs.
That.
Somewhat similar, though he’s now backtracking from the left, to Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect. Though even early on that show had PC drippings. It was where it became quite clear to me that in any debate a black woman, especially a black lesbian woman, could get away with anything and essentially ‘win’ any debate on a leftist or left-leaning forum. It took a few years more before I realized the same applied to most right and almost all right-leaning forums.
That.
Related:
Over here in the States it seemed as if Tony Blair could do no wrong, at least according to liberals.
Have I Got News For You, mentioned in the linked thread, also provided numerous examples of the same self-satisfied contempt for people who found their neighbourhoods rapidly being transformed. And while the default sniping at, say, Tory politicians was often deserved, the asymmetry of targets, in frequency and venom, was pretty obvious.
Which, again, tends to blunt any tendency to laugh. Given that those who might choose other targets too, in addition, could hardly miss the sense of being insufficiently fashionable, and indeed unwelcome.
They’re getting the message now: They are being investigated for assault.
Oh, how much I wish that all our “progressive” leaders and thinkers would get mugged. Mugged severely. And their most personally cherished possessions taken.
More comment spam. May all spammers choke on rotten dingo meat.
A footnote of sorts.