Just Like Us, You Say
Further to previous rumblings on the subject of crime, another small but noteworthy point:
Why, it’s almost as if antisocial tendencies were not neatly confined to only one form of expression.
This reply to the above is not, I think, entirely trivial:
Part of the reason that they were so desperate to cancel Live PD is that it showed 6 hours of this every weekend.
— someonesalt (@pervertputt) January 15, 2024
Indeed. As noted in one of our earlier discussions:
When finally apprehended, the thieves, themselves unharmed, were entirely unconcerned by the horror and destruction left in their wake, or the fact that it was all but miraculous that no-one had been killed. Instead, they were loudly indignant, as if they were the victims of the drama, heatedly objecting to the discomfort of handcuffs, and demanding to know why their phones had been confiscated. While, within earshot, injured children were being rushed to hospital.
Scenes like the above, of which there were many, may explain why progressives disliked the series, dismissing it as “copaganda.” I suspect the actual objection is not so much, as claimed, that the series portrayed the police in a sanitised or flattering light, as the officers were rarely the focus of the viewer’s attention.
The stars of each episode, if that’s the right word, were usually the lawbreakers. They, not the police, held the attention. They were generally the ones driving events, whether those events were alarming or farcical. And so, the series offered a glimpse into the mindset of the criminals – the recurring patterns of malevolence and selfishness – in their own words and by watching their own actions.
And obviously, we can’t have that. It makes pretentious sympathy much more difficult to muster.
Regarding those progressive assumptions and their routine departures from reality, I’d somehow forgotten about this chap:
I’d also forgotten about some of the professor’s peers and cheerleaders – among them, fellow educator Leigh Kimberg, who’s all about “compassion, healing, justice and equity,” and announcing her pronouns to random passers-by. She’s also somewhat miffed by expectations of rigour:
There’s more to be had via the links above, and in the subsequent threads.
Try not to steal anyone’s car while you’re reading.
Update, via the comments:
Regarding the conceit that habitual violent criminals are “just like everybody else,” Karl suggests,
Well, bafflingly lenient sentencing is hardly unheard of, and the irrecoverable pathology of persistent offenders can be difficult to grasp unless one has, regrettably, experienced it first-hand. As noted here before, those who’ve witnessed or experienced serious, aggressive criminality may have been wrong-footed and inhibited by their own disbelief – their own struggle to process the alien behaviour that they’re seeing. Sociopathic activity and feral predation can – to the civilised – seem bewildering and surreal:
It’s also worth noting that the field of academic criminology, in which unrealism and excuses are pretty much the default, is notoriously left-tilted, here and overseas, with liberals and radical leftists outnumbering conservative colleagues by a ratio of around 30:1.
And it occurs to me that people in high-status professions, including legal professions, are more likely to have internalised high-status opinions, mouthed as a kind of social jewellery. And which, at the moment, include opinions such as these. According to which, the creatures treating us as mere prey – suckers from whom things can be taken – are the ones most deserving of our sympathy and indulgence.
Pretentious sympathy, of course. But still.
And so we have competitively activist legal professionals, such as Mr Clive Stafford Smith, mentioned here – a man who believes that the wellbeing of burglars is more important than the wellbeing of their numerous victims, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.” And who regards anger at being burgled and the subsequent sense of violation as plebeian and unsophisticated, while disdaining the victims’ expectations of justice as, and I quote, “idiotic attitudes.”
However, contra Mr Stafford Smith and his peers, the fact that I manage to walk down the street without sucker-punching random people for being the wrong race – or stealing a car and deliberately running down elderly cyclists, killing them, while laughing – is not down to my no longer living in a rough part of town.
To claim that the kinds of creatures who do these things repeatedly, often gleefully, are just like the rest of us – only more oppressed – is farcical and perverse. And a tad insulting.
This blog is kept afloat by use of the buttons below.
*sits on hands*
That.
It is very often the case. More so, I think, than mere chance would allow. And so, we have Ms Kimberg and Professor Dettlaff railing against expectations of supporting evidence, even citations of likeminded prattle, and demanding that normal standards of argument be dispensed with, as even routine probity would make their assertions difficult to sustain.
And they do this without embarrassment.
This gives me the opportunity to once again pimp for Progressive Sentencing. No not that kind of progressive.
You see nice white middle and upper class judges and magistrates who went to good schools and live in sheltered leafy suburbs with motivated policing simply have no understanding whatsoever of the minds of the sociopathic criminal scum with whom they deal. Consequently, when they sentence them they can only imagine what would deter someone like themselves from committing the crime of stabbing their pregnant baby-momma in the belly, or whatever. So they give them 30 days suspended because “Ha – that would teach me a lesson“.
Naturally to the hardened psychopath these sentences are a joke.
The only way to either reach the sentencing level that will deter the criminal, or protect the rest of us from their predations, is to ramp up the sentencing for repeat (i.e. all of these) criminals as rapidly as possible commensurate with a level of basic fairness. Three strikes is out, therefore.
The Progressive method simply has the criminal repeat all of their previous sentences from which they failed to learn their lesson as part of each new sentence. Exponentially raising the sentencing level, whatever the ideological moron in charge thinks.
Problem rapidly solved.
Incidentally, if any reader would like to track the progress of the Scottish gritter “Gritty Gritty Bang Bang” or “Hansel And Grit-All“, amongst many puny others, there’s a handy gritter tracker map (gritters are a combination of snow plough and grit spreader).
Of course, it’s maintained by the Scottish Government, so your mileage may vary.
[ I tell you this because it’s just snowed 0.2 cm in Britain – so the mainstream media is warning everyone they’re going to die of cold. Which does make a nice change. Although some sort of journalistic standards would be preferable. ]
[ Returns from gritting duties. ]
It was a light gritting, I should add. A mere dusting.
Well, the fact that I manage to walk down the street without sucker-punching random people for being the wrong race – or stealing a car and deliberately running down elderly cyclists, killing them, while laughing – is not down to my no longer living in a rough part of town.
To claim that the kinds of creatures who do these things, and do them repeatedly, often gleefully, are just like the rest of us, only more oppressed, is a tad insulting.
See also those who insist, at some volume, that other people aren’t allowed to have differing opinions. Or to mention facts contrary to The Chosen Narrative.
Unfortunately I’m starting to feel like the star of “I am Legend”. We may soon be outnumbered. If not extinct.
I hope you gave your equipment suitably hilarious monikers such as the “Get a Grit” gloves or “Chock full o’Grits” bucket?
[ Peers out of window at half-arsed snowfall. ]
That.
Of course it would probably help if murdering psychos were actually held in prison for the duration of their sentences, instead of being let out early because some cretinous social worker thinks,
See also, progressive theories of littering. The contortions performed – the obvious considerations carefully sidestepped – are quite remarkable:
Again, a familiar unrealism and denial of agency, the same efforts to avoid the glaringly obvious. And the same farcical disingenuousness.
The update to the linked post also seems fairly apposite.
And just think of the economic boom as more prisons get built, staffed, etc. Win-win!
Victor Hugo and that damn book they made us all read. That and Grapes of Wrath. This “oh but there for the grace of God go we all” BS. Yet no one believes in God anymore. Go figure. As my mother’s cousin said about growing up in the Great Depression, “We were all poor. We didn’t steal.” We have welfare programs today that far exceed anything from back then, we have the fattest poor people in history. The only people who live without clean water, some degree of shelter, adequate clothing, electricity, basic medical care, etc. are the mentally ill who refuse the help readily available. They actually have to try not to have their basic needs met. And on top of that, the traditional assistance methods like churches and Salvation Army and such have been taken over by the kind of leftist scum who assist them in their efforts to refuse help.
The only result of this will be even more lenient sentencing. The Compassionate Judge will not put you in jail for a week for robbing that store, because you will have to repeat that week each time you rob a store.
OT: Three British vets, one of whom can never be found because he’s in the pub.
I am doomed.
Hence my repeated comments that progressives are far more of a danger to society than the criminals–and should be treated accordingly.
I don’t much mind the snow, it’s the extreme cold that bugs me. We’re getting a week of nighttime lows between 20 and 30 below zero centigrade. I was talking to a contractor who said they’re getting lots of reports of burst pipes due to freezing.
Rio sure seems attractive at the moment.
Typical CWB Chicago (tracking Chicago crime)
Man stole car, sped away from cops while on an ankle monitor for two stolen car cases: Chicago police report
Woohoo. The 110th Special Investigations Unit is gonna kick their arses!
Except that these same professors keep pushing for a “zero carbon” world in which all of us* will be poor, living marginal lives devoid of luxuries and even necessities. Not exactly the “thriving” that they claim will eliminate all temptation to steal and murder. And it should be noted that in much of dirt-poor sub-Saharan Africa muggers routinely murder their victims, not just occasionally as is the case in the West.
* Except for the ruling class, which will include all bien pensant “thinkers” like the good professor.
? But the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression did indeed ruin many hard working farmers. And government policies made the Depression last far longer than it would without those interventions. As a number of historians and economists have remarked, the Depression was an okay time, if you had a job. But the contraction in the job market made it hell for millions of honest people.
Or was your intended point somewhat different than what my reply addresses?
An old episode of Frasier. So things are looking dicey.
I have watched a lot of the original 48 hours show that followed homicide detectives in their work. One thing that struck me was how often they arrested someone who at age 19 have 5 CONVICTIONS for drugs, assault burglary etc and are not in jail. Why are they not in jail? Another thing that struck me is how disordered their lives are. No one goes by a real name, no one knows the real name of the people they hang with, everyone hangs out all the time, people let strangers crash on their couch or borrow their car, everyone has a relative who has been murdered or been to jail, people carry guns, no one is married. The entire culture is fucked. I know not a single person who has ever been to jail.
Wow. It’s almost like there’s some kind of pattern here.
Are. And always have been. “Western civilization” is not the norm…
Another part is the pathological loathing the left/liberal/progressives have to any authority not controlled by their own selves being shown in a positive light.
Yet they didn’t steal.
Bingo.
And the further you were from government and the mainstream economy, the better off you were. You figured out how to make yourself useful. Create your own job. Not every dust bowl farmer ran off to California to fight with Mexicans over the opportunity to pick someone else’s grapes. Of course back then government didn’t get in your way to pursue opportunities nor tax you back into poverty on every dime you scraped. I remember repeating to my father, who grew up on rented farm land in western Pennsylvania how they told us in school that WWII was what ended the Great Depression and he (again) looked at me like I was an idiot. The GD was over long before WWII. But they had to sell us on that idea to push the Keynesianism (which Nixon said we all are now) of government spending. TGoW was a big part of that sell. Not overtly but as part of the great New Deal media brainwashing.
Yes, and that is always true, but government policy had seriously shrunk the economy so that there were fewer jobs and fewer opportunities to create jobs.
For some reason I first read ‘gritter’ as ‘grifter’ and couldn’t figure out what was so special about the Scottish variety that I’d be interested in tracking them.
Everybody: Can you point out websites that cover crime in other locales?
One of those fix-er-upper shows on HGTV featuring cabins in Maine…so…not sure. A mix of burly carpenters and hippy-dippy artsy-fartsy types.
In other OT news, my wife is texting with her very well off sister about some meltdown SIL is having because, as they are vacationing in the Palm Beaches, a certain restaurant requires proper foot attire. No sandals or tennis shoes (or wtf they’re called anymore). I’m taking note of the restaurant and planning to drive 40 minutes out of our way (gee, just like Buc-ee’s which same SIL looks down on) next Christmas to eat there. Can’t wait. ooh, wife sent the link in case anyone in the area wants to live all civilized and shit for a while…
https://delraybeach.lecolonial.com/menus/lunch
dress code at the bottom.
Or “glitter”. The roads are impassable but fabulous.
The horror, the horror! /sarcasm
By the way, the half-arsed snowfall mentioned upthread now has no arse at all.
Updates may follow, conditions permitting.
Oh I don’t know, he might be able to talk the kidnappers into surrendering. Or killing themselves. It certainly has that effect on me.
So after the thumping the NeverTrump crowd took in Iowa last night I thought I would check in on Patterico (I couldn’t help myself) to see if the derangement has hit bottom yet…
No, apparently not. He even seems to have lost some (most?) of his fellow NeverTrump sycophants. Were he just some common rando with a blog it would not seem so disconcerting. This man has considerable power in his locale. Anyone this unhinged should not be in a position of influence over anyone’s life, liberty, or property. Yet he persists. In the leftist of leftist California. These people are themselves the dangerous ones. I do not see how any of this ends without considerable destruction. Of course I saw this coming several years ago. As it gets closer and closer I get more and more frustrated with people who dismiss it with the “these things have ways of resolving themselves” attitude.
Theodore Dalrymple’s Litter is a nice, non-progressive, survey of the subject.
Join the club.
The last television show I watched was a stage version of Cyrano de Bergerac.
Going all Scipio Aemilianus on the Tea Party hasn’t worked out quite like they thought it would.
Incidentally, if any reader would like to track the progress of the Scottish gritter “Gritty Gritty Bang Bang” or “Hansel And Grit-All“, amongst many puny others, there’s a handy gritter tracker map
What do you do for fun when it’s not snowing?
Please remind me: Where did Patterico stand on the TEA Party movement?
I stopped paying attention to him many years ago.
Speaking of litter, we’re now supposed to express concern over the state of the moon’s environment.
The TEA Party was voters asking nicely for change.
Trump was voters asking not so nicely.
“When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly.”
–Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit
Pretty sure he was good with the TEA Party movement. A cursory search showed some opposition to the IRS persecution of the movement back in 2013. Didn’t look much further. Personally I saw the TEA Party as controlled opposition. I’m the only member I know of in the SEA Party. Spent Enough Already. Spending is the problem. Taxing is the after affect.
As I said, were he not someone with significant, though granted local, power, it would not be so disconcerting.
Sometimes a fish does need a bicycle.
Thanks. Sometimes my memory needs filling in.
Sometimes a fish does need a bicycle.
This is my sister-in-law and her partner exactly.
Pretty similar – scream obscenities at regular lorries.
“two lesbians trying to charge a car battery”
To be fair, I think lesbians are somewhat less likely to be this clueless than heterosexual women, but only somewhat, and the problem is greatest among urban women–small town and rural folk of all sexes and orientations are more self-reliant.
But a number of the feminists I’ve known were rather like this, and it was amusing in later years to notice how much they depended on men who Knew Stuff.
Query: Who was it who said “progressive ideas are parasitic upon a working, traditional civilization”?
Can’t say I disagree.
Here’s something that I have been pondering a bit since Nikky Haley went all “You want something done, ask a woman”…Imagine your favorite, most successful, most well balanced woman. For me this is pretty much Maggie Thatcher but of course YMMV. Imagine if instead of going through life with all the deferences we make to the fairer sex, instead she was held to the expectations for basic mechanical knowledge or athletic acumen or breadth of scientific knowledge, the sort of Renaissance Man expectations. Men need to spend considerable time on a much broader range of topics, abilities, ideas that take time away from the more bookish, written word stuff that women tend to excel at. On top of that, men are also expected to maintain a sense of humor regardless of what is sent their way. Would a successful woman be able to do all those other things outside her specialty that men are expected to do/know outside of their specialties and still be as successful? I mean, is Renaissance Woman even a thing? Heh. I just googled ‘renaissance woman’ and it returned ‘Renaissance Man’.
Net zero.
I’m not convinced of that: Men and women have different preferences and interests, which leads to different choices of careers and hobbies. Thus men and women end up with different strengths. It is also the case that there are plenty of men whose careers and interests end up being rather bookish–and thus there are men who don’t know how to repair cars.
Betcha this suspect is “known to the police” with a long history of violence. But he’s not in prison because “equity” demands that he be on the street getting “help” to overcome his “disability”.
Pretty similar – scream obscenities at regular lorries.
So life’s not really that much different over there. We call them trucks, but they’re as annoying as f*ck.
In the winter, you spend an hour digging out your driveway only to have the snowplow create a 3 foot high wall of ice and snow where your driveway meets the road. Meanwhile, the sidewalk plow, driven by someone who has had a few, can’t seem to keep his vehicle on the sidewalk, digging up about $500 worth of turf you had just had installed during the early summer.
Good times!
Renaissance Man: women complain about unrealistic expectations but men are expected to know lots of things. Garage door won’t open? Ask your husband. Plumbing leak? Ask your husband (AYH). Managing your IRA? AYH. Tire pressure is low? AYH And it is simply expected that the husband knows these things by default. No one expects women to know about plumbing–maybe they do but no one just expects it.
No one expects women to know about plumbing–maybe they do but no one just expects it.
It’s worse than that. No one expects women to know how cook or sew or clean. I’m in my early sixties and I’d say, in our group of friends, it runs about 3 to 1 where the man does the cooking and the grocery shopping. As for sewing, I picked up a couple of pairs of pants that were being hemmed for my son. It cost over $30. Meanwhile, Molly Maid charges $200 to clean an average size home. So it’s not like there’s not great value in these “old” “sexist” skills.
Good grief.
That’s what children are for. 😀
But seriously, it’s better for middle aged Dad to not shovel snow.
One wonders if this is a case of game recognizing game. Maybe these gentle-minded leftists are living vicariously through others’ violence. Maybe if they were better endowed with the physical prowess or unmitigated gall, they would do the same themselves.
Maybe they’re secretly glad that other people are being battered and burgled, and their assurances that there’s nothing really bad going on are born not of naiveté but secret malice and sociopathic gaslighting.
At some point you can’t assume stupidity; you have to assume malice. Those who ensured that like-minded DAs would set psychopaths loose on the population are not misguided. They’re sadists.
Prison psychopaths play idealistic social workers and shrinks like violins. They know exactly how to affect remorse, how to sound reformed, how to flatter the shrink into thinking that the shrink helped them See the Light.
I wish there were a way to reliably diagnose sociopathy, because then we could either summarily put them down like rabid dogs or exile them to a remote island in Canada’s north.
Last-viewed show: My Cat from Hell, so the dude with the tats and a whole slew of well-behaved housecats. To my rescue.
raises hand
I know how to use those things. Done it a few times, too. I’m just an old spinster over here, not even lesbian or anything. Which, I would expect at least one of a pair to be butch enough to know how to use them.
Also, did this get posted here or did I see it elsewhere? It’s words you’re likely to know, by sex.
Could it be retirement? After the kids are grown and gone and both husband and wife are home together, I’ve seen lots of men gravitate to cooking just because it interests them and they now have time to indulge. Hubs and I are both retired and share cooking … sometimes he’s chef and I’m sous, other times vice versa.
And in reference to weather … we moved out of So. California last April and are in SW Washington state. Got our first real snow over this last week, Monday/Tuesday mornings were in the mid-teens Fahrenheit. And the 7 m/o GSD is crazy in love with the snow.
Nice to see that the predators don’t have it all their way, when police are allowed to police properly.
[ Post updated again, at some length. ]
It’s like something out of a zombie horror film.
Yes.
Sidewalk plow?
Mind. Boggled.
Over here the pavement [sic] is where the plough [sic] puts the excess snow.
And where the dogshit goes in summer.
If that’s not the title of your first book of poetry, I’ll be terribly disappointed.
Now processing the notion of dogshit migration. Presumably, it would roll across the grass, like tumbleweed.
It’s possible I need more coffee.
You could probably ease back on the Adderall.
However, now I think about it – perhaps an anthology of poems, subtly edited “for a modern audience“?
Or
Waddaya think?
It’s staggering in its beauty.
I suspect we’ve veered off-course somewhat.
Karl: you should apply for a grant.
Remember to say you want to work on your poetry without being distracted by working for The Man.
And make abundant use of the words ‘authentic’, ‘urban’, and above all ‘gritty’.
Here’s the thing…why is cooking considered to be such a female-ish thing? I may have said this before but when I was working many years ago I would take leftovers for lunch. My (female) cube-neighbor would be impressed by my lunch and say how my wife must be a very good cook. A couple of times I had to point out that I had made whatever it was. The thing about this is that if you walk into the best restaurants in the world, or in your city or town, or even the most mediocre restaurants, the chief cook is more likely to be a man. Yet this cooking-is-female-superior thing persists. I’m trying to think of something that goes the other way. Something that is considered to belong in the male domain yet professionally one might find that milieu dominated (or even half occupied) by women.
Dentistry. Apparently.
Knoxville got its biggest snow since 1993 on Monday, some 8 to 10 inches. Best picture from the storm I have seen occurred early in it, when this legend stole a motorized shopping cart from the grocery store to get to where he wanted to go.
Knoxville’s nickname is Scruffy City and this citizen is doing his best to keep it scruffy!
BTW, most of us are housebound now. The snow stopped but now our temps have dropped precipitously. It was 1 degree (-17C) when I took the Weim Crime Syndicate out for their first walk of the day. We are under a wind chill advisory where -10 (-23C) to -15 (-26C) might be felt. And yet in a week’s time, we will be back at 50 (10C). Thankfully, I have power and an untapped bottle of Rebel bourbon.
Like bread and eggs, it’s a staple in the Richer household.
And the 7 m/o GSD is crazy in love with the snow.
Snow dogs, you say?
https://vimeo.com/903309018
(Bronx is the darker Weimaraner, Zeke is the lighter one)
Theodore Dalrymple is a notable and rare exception.
You are, without a doubt, correct:
I know from personal experience that at least some of these “progressives” are indeed motivated by resentment and malice.
I have also known some that were too stupid to understand that their utopian fantasies were incompatible with reality.
And in many cases “too stupid to understand” must be replaced by “unwilling to understand”–because being smarter and more virtuous than everyone else is vital to their sense of self worth.
Some were clearly angry that others were more successful than them–smarter, wiser, more technical skills, more social skills. Thus, they embraced a political ideology that justified tearing down those that they envied.
Others (often themselves successful) seemed to be angry that their society was not a Big Rock Candy Mountain utopia, and so wished to destroy that society. Did they feel guilt at their own success and turn their guilt away from themselves into hatred of all around them? Very possibly. And it was amazing how successfully they concealed from themselves the far greater flaws in other cultures which they wished to allow to destroy our culture.
It is often true that the nastiest enemies of our culture live in safe communities far away from danger. But this is not always true; I have known leftists who lived in slum neighborhoods who pretended that their criminal neighbors were virtuous citizens.
And all those pious souls who churn out ready-made excuses for opportunist creatures who are notorious for saying whatever will serve their interests at any given point in time. And so, we get looters and shoplifters instantly denouncing as racist anyone who dares to thwart them, or mimicking “I can’t breathe,” as if the act of being handcuffed were akin to suffocation.
Which brings to mind some of the excuses heard during old episodes of Cops – for instance, “These aren’t my pants,” said by several gentlemen whose trouser pockets contained pipes, wraps and other paraphernalia.
Topped only by a similarly equipped woman who, having evidently had some practice, insisted, “This isn’t my bra.”
Reminding us that stereotypes based on reality are nonetheless merely generalizations and not universals.
James Damore got fired from Google for pointing out that there are statistical differences between men and women while emphasizing that this said nothing about any individuals.
Queen Elizabeth II drove and maintained British Army trucks during WWII.
Nature sits in stern mastery over these rocks and crags. The rush of the mountain stream, the bleat of the sheep, and the broad, clear Highland skies, reflected in tarn and loch … form the breathtaking backdrop against which Ewan McTeagle writes such poems as ‘Lend us a quid till the end of the week’.
All I ask is that we don’t careen into a pile of snow and dogshit.
Queen Elizabeth II drove and maintained British Army trucks during WWII.
Correct, and the operative word was “sometimes” like this idiot.
I have questions…
You almost have to admire the boldness. At the time, it prompted me to wonder whether ladies do in fact routinely share their bras, or have neighbourhood bra libraries, where you can check one out for a few weeks then return it. And whether a lady could actually put on someone else’s bra without detecting the dozen wraps of crystal meth and assorted items of glassware stashed therein.
Hey, I’m just thinking it through.
[ Turns towards ladies, peers over spectacles. ]
QEII in WWII, today, ladies, you might get drafted. “Oh no you d’int”
And so we veer further off-course into realms of paraphilia.
…and eventually arrive at an inevitable Monty Python reference.
Because everything eventually terminates in a Monty Python reference.
Have you been troubled by chemistry injustice? Then hie yourself over to Rice “University” and sign up for Afrochemistry.
Caveat emptor –
OTOH, if you are looking for an easy A to pad your GPA, Bob is your father’s brother.