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.
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From the replies:
This meme was made for pseudo-smart people like mark gillam:
See also: “Nobody needs magazines with more than 8 bullets.” Also 6, also…well you know the routine.
we are getting closer and closer to literal Harrison Bergeron
The production has a good concept, and individual songs are excellent, but the overall narrative is hopelessly muddled. The composer/writer comes across as an airheaded millennial teenager; she claims to have been enamoured of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice since she started writing, but the stageplay makes it clear she had no real understanding of that myth nor the Hades and Persephone myth.
But leave off the pedantic classicism; on its own the narrative makes no sense. The Underworld is portrayed as where everyone goes after death, a place you can never leave – and in the next scene an allegory for Trump’s Walled America, where everything is luxury and the residents want to keep the deserving immigrants out by any means. Orpheus is intentionally directed as near-autistic, which is why he doesn’t notice Eurydice starving in the street because he’s obsessed with finishing his song; Eurydice was recast for the travelling production with a mixed-race actress whose voice is barely up to the task and is – there’s no nice way to say this – ugly. And Hades’ look was changed from the Broadway production to make him resemble gigachad.
It’s just a mess, and this thing won awards. The whole thing felt like watching Naomi Wolf get interviewed.
Probation, and more probation.
Indeed. My “progressive” friends disliked the series, the more to the left they were the stronger their dislike. I only wish I had kept a journal in which I recorded their comments to preserve their language, tone, and “reasoning”.
They strongly supported policies that treated criminals leniently and that concealed from the public the facts about recidivism, racial patterns in lawbreaking, and the falseness of claims about police racism.
Looking back, their solicitous concern for criminals–and especially for dark-skinned criminals–should have convinced me much more quickly that their “progressive” talk of “caring” was a mask for an utterly depraved and malevolent ideology.