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?
John Cleese is still an idiot.
Still can’t believe that one’s real.
Phrasing.
The progressive project in a nutshell.
Maybe I didn’t read enough of it (I have come to loathe most professional sports and the fanboy mess it has become) but I didn’t see the thread itself getting derailed. Though this part from that link:
Yeah…Maybe say you don’t like his politics or getting political and leave it at that but to get into that sort of a detailed screed in a football discussion group is ridiculous. Even for the NFL. Try to imagine a football discussion in 1965…or 1975…that brought up Bart Starr’s politics or who Roger Staubach may have voted for. Howard Cosell wouldn’t even go that far. Yet it is rather common today.
“That’s a tough one,” says she.
They may well be right.
Understand Candy Crush is a popular way to fill time.
There are times when the death of the West seems to be taking entirely too long.
Are you sure those are meant to be warnings? Or are they meant to be indicators like the fishing hotspots on my Garmin app.
We rightfully fear vigilantism as fraught with dangers to good individuals and society itself, but I have been wondering if South Africa may have descended so far as to justify not only summary “street justice” against captured criminals but also against all their friends, on the assumption that anyone who is friends with a criminal is also a criminal or is at least on the side of criminals and thus deserving of “removal”. The Western left seems to be working overtime to bring about such a situation here. [ Pauses for a moment in contemplation. Regrets lifelong aversion to day drinking. ]
If that thread is typical of sports fans, then I must say they are much more sane that the science fiction, fantasy, and medievalist fans I’ve known, because in their fora your objections would be loudly slapped down by a chorus of leftist assholes…even though the fora had explicit “no politics” rules.
Regarding the Asimov quote in that thread: I don’t know his editorial was directed at any particular unnamed individuals, but Asimov’s allegiance to evidence and logic was severely compromised by his allegiance to Soviet communism.
Not American at all. Of course the “smart” people in NYC see that as a positive, so…
From the Washington Post:
While I must confess I have never warmed to Trump, I find this kind of hysteria beyond annoying.
But it’s also instructive, in relation to the main topic of this thread, that in a city which has (or certainly until recently had) reportedly Mad Max levels of criminal activity that the real and absolutely unforgivable sin is buying a Tesla or putting a check in the wrong box on your ballot paper.
I’m going to embrace the power of and here, mainly because of the hellhole city I live in, where people like me are expected to be prey for whatever bold ferals we are unlucky enough to encounter, while at the same time being tax cows to be milked for every penny that can be extracted. And just about every week “The Blurting” crosses my mind as I smile politely at a co-worker unleashing the most unhinged things they believe Prez. OMB is going to do. It’s a strange, unpleasant mix.
[ Peers in kitchen cupboard, stares at bag of sour jelly snakes, ostensibly bought for any passing trick-or-treaters on Friday evening. ]
[ Considers disconnecting door bell. ]
I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. Well, I’ve had it for a while, but…I’m not the only one.
This thing is “swag, awesome, gay, and um…“, and the rest of us are jealous.
There is violence in disease and she has learned better to do better.
One more time. Low in conscientiousness, high in neuroticism.
In the 1990s in Canada, a woman was found not guilty – note, not “not guilty by reason of diminished capacity”, just straight-up not guilty – of savagely assaulting a stranger at a bus stop. Her defense? He bore a passing resemblance to an assailant who had r*ped her years prior.
Jian Ghomeshi was acquitted by the skin of his teeth only after his accusers were caught red-handed conspiring to fabricate the case against him (note: verified emails from his primary accuser demonstrating zero regret for their liaison and eagerness for more were not enough).
If you’re a member of a protected class, the law doesn’t apply to you. Simple as.
Good and hard, NYC. Good and hard.
Obviously not, she’s still ‘sharing air’.
Transgenderism is the last refuge of a sex offender.¹
¹With apologies to Doctor Johnson
The fall of Johannesburg makes me sad. It seems like a city on the edge of a desert where the prevailing winds inexorably blow in the sand, gradually burying the city, and human effort is too puny to stop it.
What is the deal? Too few honest people? Too few people with advanced executive functioning and conscientiousness?
When a traffic light fails, what stops it from being repaired or replaced in a reasonable time? How many people are in that chain who Just Don’t Do Their Job, such that the light remains broken indefinitely?
How many people looted the treasury such that the parts aren’t available? How many are not civic-minded enough to think, “Hey, life goes better for everyone if we address this with dispatch”?
Depressing as hell. Humanity always reverts to the mean. Or worse.
That’s gonna leave a mark.
A bit of context.
Let the games begin.
Mayhap some reconsideration of the flags being run up lampposts is in order.
Failed the CDL test?
I’m feeling an urge to buy the driver a beverage of his choice.
Not entirely unrelated to the subject of the post above.
Again, in terms of sentencing, being mentally ill or retarded, being devoid of the normal behavioural restraints, should be an aggravating factor, not a mitigating one.
Societal collapse: sorry, wrong. The roman empire lasted almost 1000 years in the West and continued another 1000 in the East until the moslems captured it. The West was brought down by plague and invasion of Germanic tribes. The Chinese kingdoms changed due to dynastic succession issues. Egyptian empires likewise succession battles but otherwise lasted thousands of years. Persian empire 1000(?) years. Other empires brought down by drought/disease or conquest.
A shortfall in mean IQ of somewhere between one and two standard deviations, I would guess.
Unfortunately, the suspect survived.
Let us not forget the lack of civilisational habits formed over centuries.
That’s not the reprieve it may first appear. Between the speed at which he hit the pavement and the motorcycle bouncing onto him after he did he will never be free of pain.
Just what I was going to say.
Here’s a thought: Cease all foreign aid. No more sentimental subsidizing of failure. No cash, no vaccinations, no digging wells, no nothing. Instead, establish Western-run economic zones where Africans can learn by example how things work. After a few centuries they might be able to do it themselves.
“A consummation devoutly to be wished.”
Peter Boghossian interviews the formidable Mia Hughes. On paraphilias, deception and trans medical scandals.
The interview’s an hour long, but for those pushed for time, this section here may be of interest.
Previously and related.
Why not a contributing factor? Severely weakening a culture and making it more vulnerable to all sorts of stresses and events? Sand in the gears which make everything more expensive, difficult, and time consuming–when not actually impossible.
Take that for what it’s worth, as I haven’t read the link yet.
Fast thinking by the off-duty deputy. Criminy, I lived and worked in Rancho Cucamonga for years and had a front row seat via watching the rising crime in that small community 40 miles away from Los Angeles. Due, in no small part, because of the Democrats who run the state top-to-bottom and the “progressive” lemmings who support them.
Only going to get worse.
This is what prisons set up specifically for the criminally insane were for. These are people who need to be kept out of normal society forever. For their own protection, cuz I swear vigilantism is going to be ugly.
Yeah…no. I mean I agree that, in the US at least, it’s not at this point completely inevitable but we live in an age where everything is sped up. In those previous civilizations the decline was slow and took many generations. People and bad ideas moved much, much slower. When you tolerate you enemies inside your gates and sufficient numbers of your own people (and sufficient doesn’t need to be much more than 10%) are openly aligned with those now internal enemies, you are on a road to disaster. We came within a few million votes of already being past the point of no return less than a year ago. Maybe, maaaybe we can pull out of this without a lot of bloodshed but given that very, very few people in the US, or western civilization in general, can stand the thought, let alone the sight of blood
“They’re dragging fathers out of their homes!”