Somehow Overlooked
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.
Indeed, one might note the underlying belief that the outrage and horror of being robbed at knifepoint or gunpoint – the degree of violation and moral injury, the amount of wrongness – depends only on the amount of cash you happened to have on you at the time.
Which, again, rather screws over people who don’t have a lot of money.
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.
On this and much else, progressives 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 habitual and violent predation, 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.
And so, we arrive at the implication that women, for instance, should resign themselves to a low-trust urban dystopia, and learn to accept the growing risk of being menaced and assaulted, or worse, on public transport, so that habitually criminal brutes can be given more chances to decide not to be habitually criminal brutes.
Because accommodating brutes, indulging them with more chances, is somehow better, fairer, more moral.
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.
And when faced with an avalanche of pushback and factual correction, Mr Rosenwald, our statusful scholar and thinker of deep thoughts, simply waves his hands dismissively and says, “I could care less – I’m a historian. The research on three-strike laws is unambiguous. Who cares what people on here think?”
Before ascending to the heavens, like some higher being.
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.
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I’m retired, so I’m rarely up before 4AM local time.
Do I win? Is it cake?
It’s true. The left never gets angry about what the Chicoms do.
Awfully precise about staying outside the line.
Crime is for criminals, and prosecution of gun laws is for the law-abiding. We’ve seen it so many times before. This idiotic moral relativism debases any society that tolerates it.
Any self-described “Historian” who refuses to learn from history is profoundly dunce-like.
Heh. But it is a strange assumption, an odd box to stand on while acting all pious.
The idea that the relatively trivial amount of cash of which someone has been robbed is the defining moral issue, the only factor of importance. Not the whole knife-to-the-throat business and fear of imminent death. As if one needn’t reflect on the kind of person who goes about his day doing that to others, over and over again, and what one might infer about his trajectory.
And the importance or otherwise of his continued existence.
She’s not wrong. And I can personally relate, having encountered people who made much the same manoeuvres. In which niceness, as they see it, or pretend to see it, overrides all other concerns. As if nothing could be at stake, and be lost, as a result.
It’s quite mad.
And the people insisting on this niceness can be remarkably unpleasant in their insistence. Not least in the insinuation that you should have been willing to pretend, and to mouth whatever lies and absurdities are expected, like they do.
It’s perhaps worth considering the dynamic above, as it crops up quite often. The pantomime of piety, the invocations of niceness, by people who are clearly resentful and often vividly obnoxious. Because, by being realistic and preferring to tell the truth, you’ve revealed the lie in which they participate, and on which their own social status depends.
By not being cowed or pretentious, or weak, you’ve revealed, perhaps inadvertently, what they are.
BOOM deyyy-it-is
[ Slurps coffee. ]
Needless to say, it’s difficult to have a realistic exchange with someone who’s obviously mad at you, but is unwilling to say why.
Just a reminder that the hosting service will be doing some server maintenance around 10am, so there may be some brief or intermittent downtime.
Tagline for an unmade 80s action flick.
I, too, have noticed that–and not just strangers; also friends and relatives.
These people lack a brain or spine (maybe both) and are miserable. The adage about misery loving company is absolutely true.
“Too blunt” gets used an excuse to punish dissent from orthodoxy.
My liberal friends justified Larry Summers’ ousting from Harvard University on the grounds that he was insufficiently tactful in his discussion of possible reasons for the relative lack of women in STEM fields.
The University of Pennsylvania punished Amy Wax for similar speech crimes regarding the lack of high-achieving black students in the law school.
Robbery: the reason for prosecution is the knife or gun. They are threatening to kill someone. The dollar value is irrelevant.
I see we survived the server maintenance relatively unscathed.
[ Straightens ornaments. ]
Which is pretty much all of your historians. Well, the ones that matter, anyway.
Willies will out.
Why, it’s almost as if the ingratitude, the gratuitous harassment and the urge to coerce are very much part of his identity.
Part of who he is.
Oops.
This discussion sent me back down a rabbit hole…well a wkipedia one anyway…regarding that damned Les Miserables novel (or as frequently referred to by a friend in high school The Miserable Les(bians). Anyway…I forgot the part about how Jean Valjean stole 40 sou (or whatever) from a 12 year old boy. Had I the talent and discipline, I would be tempted to write an alternative ending where JV goes to prison and that little boy uses his returned money to start a business, marries Cosette, raises a good Christian family, Javert spends his time catching even more dangerous criminals, and all this eventually plays out in a series of events in which the French Revolution never happens, Marxism never gets any traction, and everyone lives happily ever after. They say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
To paraphrase Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein, “Put the tumor back.”
On the brighter side:
Recording during surgery: sure, the thing at the top of my list when doctors are trying to save my life during surgery is my pronouns. Priorities people, priorities.
Oh, and during abdominal surgery it actually IS relevant which biological sex you are. There are organs and tubes present/absent from one sex to the other.
I’m reminded of the order of the brit NHS that doctors must do pap tests on trans XY….who do not have a cervix, and prostate exams of trans XX….who do not have a prostate.
First, what kind of buffoons would let him take a phone into an OR, or, seeing as how this was a lung resection and the patient is generally starkers under the sheets, where was the phone secreted (I don’t really want to know). I’m not really buying the story.
Second…
I, for one, am flabbergasted at that revelation, next thing you know they will tell us the risk of cervical cancer is nil.
Yeah, that was bugging me as well. Though the rest of it, what little I bothered about, seems legit…I wondered if he didn’t have a nurse accomplice, one who may have even originated the idea to persecute the doctor or others in the OR. That seems much more likely.
Yet another Indian illegal truck driver has caused a deadly accident.
This.
They all have GPS.
But they often cross those lines, after turning off their transponders. And they get aggressive when anyone who challenges them. After all, they’re China and thus entitled to do as they wish to lesser races.
They are reminiscent of the aliens in Independence Day: Locusts.
Illegal truck drivers, Somalis getting millions, mail in ballots, open borders, objecting to closing USAID, supporting Mangione (killer), etc. They reject the very concept of law.
And the people insisting on this niceness can be remarkably unpleasant in their insistence.
Further to this idea, and going with the J.K. Rowling theme – I was reading something this weekend that said the most hated character in the Harry Potter fictional universe was Dolores Umbridge. She was all that David said in that comment, wrapped up in pink tweed. She may have been pure fiction, but her type is all over the real world, especially in academia and government.
The film in which Umbrage appears was the first one to hold my attention. Something important is captured in her character, something very now.
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