Some elaboration on an item from Friday’s Ephemera:

Liberals do this very weird thing where some deranged, violent criminal sticks a gun in your face and demands your wallet, but the wallet only has $20 in it, so from then on they’ll minimize the crime by describing it as, “stealing only $20.”

This is so fundamentally dishonest… https://t.co/fDj2uCk8m1

— wanye (@xwanyex) November 23, 2025

Readers will note the sly conceit that what matters, all that matters, is the sum being stolen this time, not the whole at knifepoint or gunpoint business – as if this lively means of cash extraction were some trivial detail, beneath acknowledgment. A thing with no informational content, no clues as to the character of the perpetrator, their fitness for a civilised world.

Those pointing to the smallness of the sum as if it were a significant mitigating factor don’t seem troubled by the implication that someone who will violate others, and threaten them with death, for a mere $20 is someone who will use very small incentives to behave in monstrous ways. Likewise, the implication that robbing people with only $20 to surrender is a matter of no import.

The chappie doing the pointing in this case is Brian Rosenwald, a scholar in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, a teacher of history and political science, a shaper of young minds. Mr Rosenwald objects to a three-strikes law whereby “you had people stealing $10 items and getting life sentences,” which he describes as a “disaster,” a series of “foolish, unjust outcomes.”

To which commenter John D replies,

There is, shall we say, some sleight-of-hand. And a now familiar flattening of values, a signature of progressive posturing. And so, as noted in the replies on X, histories of armed robbery, carjacking, assault and battery, serial sucker-punching and other vigorous activities, all horrific for the victims, are somehow reduced to “stealing $20.”

So hey, no biggie.

As noted here many, many times, progressives often have a wildly inaccurate conception of the criminal demographic and of the psychology and motives in play, as expressed by the criminals themselves. A conception so inaccurate, one might call it perverse.

Readers with a taste for corrective statistics regarding recidivism and motives will find much to widen the eyes here. Along with some striking illustrations of how a very large fraction of crime could be prevented by dealing decisively with a surprisingly small number of persistent offenders.

To concentrate, as Mr Rosenwald does, on the assumed triviality of the third strike, rather than the seriousness of the first two, and the pattern of behaviour being vividly revealed, is quite the manoeuvre. As if the refusal to be law-abiding after repeated warnings of incarceration – and what might be deduced from that – couldn’t possibly be useful information.

It occurs to me that someone who, having been warned in the strongest terms that any further law-breaking will have severe consequences – and who nonetheless continues violating others, whether for trivial gains or for purposes of recreation – is someone unlikely ever to become a functional and trustworthy citizen, someone to be given, once again, benefit of the doubt.

Again, progressives as a class aren’t just wrong in some detail, some particular, some point misunderstood. The assumptions so often in play, the relentless contrivance, the defining mindset, are fundamentally, directionally wrong. There’s an air of perverse motivation.

Such that the law-abiding, including the many victims of these creatures, are expected to endorse an insane leniency, a grotesque forgiveness, on grounds that their own safety and expectations of justice should be rescinded in favour of giving an irredeemable sociopath another 56 chances to learn how to behave.

These are people whose every action screams “I am someone who cannot be trusted in a civilised society. I am dangerous and always will be. I will hurt people, for fun, because it amuses me, over and over again, until I am forcibly stopped.” And our analyst and scholar, our esteemed academic, says, “Oh, nonsense. Nothing to worry about. We can fix them.”

While having no idea how.

Pst314 adds,

And not just academia.

I’ve mentioned before an episode of the long-running comedy-quiz show QI, in which Stephen Fry and his celebrity panellists sneered at the three-strikes policy with much tutting and condescension.

Viewers were given the impression 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 previously. Nor did they seem interested in having those who’d been incarcerated roaming free in their own neighbourhoods, carjacking their neighbours, or breaking into their homes.

None of the participants seemed keen to find themselves or their loved ones being robbed at knifepoint, or gunpoint, even for a modest sum.

But everyone congratulated themselves on being so lofty and enlightened. Not like those redneck Americans and their silly, punitive ideas. Expectations of punishment and public safety being so terribly déclassé.

A recurring theme of the QI series is to show how common assumptions are sometimes wrong or misleading. And so there was a certain unintended irony in seeing the left-of-centre politics of the host and panellists being affirmed by an omission of facts. An omission that could not plausibly have been an accident.

The same sleight-of-hand as practised by our indignant academic. In a show about the wrongness of things that are widely assumed.