The Progressive Anxiety
Lifted from the comments, Mr Burkett ponders crime and its apologists:
Which means that if police and prosecutors are free to do their jobs in the most basic and obvious way, which is to say that they are free to pursue crime where it exists and allowed to arrest and prosecute those people who actually commit crimes, then those policies will reify disparities that even mainstream liberals agree are unconscionable.
This means that they will always be in tension with any attempt to effectively police crime. This tension is not incidental or tangential or irrelevant. It is core to why liberals must always to some degree be in opposition to criminal justice.
Regarding the consequent conflictedness and anxiety, all that progressive wrongness, these three posts include some fairly vivid illustrations of the phenomenon.
Among which, a claim that more theatre for schoolchildren would somehow deter the kinds of creatures who repeatedly and gleefully sucker-punch elderly ladies for being the wrong race, and a chap who insists that women should allow themselves to be mugged at bus stops lest their mugger, out on probation, come to harm.
Oh, and the belief, expressed tearfully and at length by a Guardian columnist, that when you find your home being burgled in the middle of the night, the real victims, the people deserving of sympathy and indulgence, are the ones breaking into your home while brandishing carving knives and then driving off with your valuables in your car.
In the examples featured in the posts above, the perpetrator is typically black and the apologist white. This recurring racial hang-up is often made explicit – as when the activist and lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, mentioned here, dismissed objections to being burgled as, and I quote, “idiotic attitudes,” while telling Guardian readers that the wellbeing of burglars is more important than the wellbeing of their victims, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.”
Mr Stafford Smith went on to chide and insult the victims of burglary, and the law-abiding generally, while offering implausible excuses for those who break into strangers’ homes and steal their belongings, and who do this over and over again with ever greater boldness. And none of these claims were challenged, at all, in the Guardian‘s fawning interview. Apparently, among many progressives, such contrivance is not only congenial, but terribly high-status.
Perversity as piety.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
That’s one of your best. 🎯
Thank you. It does, I think, capture something of the psychology in play, the conflictedness and weird convolutions. As Mr Burkett says, the issue he highlights is not trivial. It often results in positions that are loudly asserted yet morally surreal.
Meanwhile, in post-apartheid South Africa, they seem to have just given up. I especially like that at least the government is kind enough to post signs warning “Hi-Jacking Hot Spot” or “Smash and Grab Hot Spot.”
(gift link to get behind paywall)
I think I’d have to go for The Blurting from 2019. Still relevant today. Just last week someone on a (gridiron) football board I’m on totally derailed a thread bitching that a player publicly espoused wrongthink. Said poster then tried to argue that no, it wasn’t his posts that are political.
[ Post updated. ]
[ Awaits further candidates for my best posts, and loud affirmations of my general awesomeness. ]
What?