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.

Or, Assume The Position.

A point made in the comments and possibly worth repeating:

From what I’ve seen over the years, the word ally is typically used, by the people who rush to use it, to mean something like advocate, or mouthpiece, or supplicant, or puppet. There’s no discernible interest in, or expectation of, reciprocation; no obvious shared goal or mutual benefit. Indeed, the role, once assumed, appears to entail saying dumb and vividly untrue things, thereby becoming unreliable and absurd.

Say, by insisting that odd, cross-dressing men are somehow, magically, women. Or that a reluctance to mouth fabulist pronouns, to affirm a person’s imaginary themness, is some life-threatening moral oversight.

And then there are the not infrequent detours into outright struggle sessions – as seen, for instance, here, where a disobedient woman finds herself being scolded by a man in an unconvincing wig for not doing the “work” expected of an ally – essentially cowed deference and dishonesty on demand.

Specifically,

This, then, is a world in which allyship – “listening to the community” – requires prostration, a suspension of cognitive faculties, and a surrendering of basic probity.

In the case above, regarding race, the duty of the ally would presumably be to announce, as Mr Zellie does, that preferring the civilised to the thuggish is “a white supremacist construct,” to regurgitate his assertions about the character and motives of “straight white men,” to demand the “defunding” of the police, as Mr Zellie does, and jumping through whatever rhetorical hoops, and taking whatever “action,” Mr Zellie deems appropriate or amusing.

The only benefit I can see for those willing to debase themselves in this way would be the hope that Mr Zellie won’t assert or imply that you’re a racist, or that you’re insufficiently “anti-racist.” And therefore racist.

Not, it has to be said, the most tempting offer.

As someone notes in reply to the post quoted above,

Not an unfair summary.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

The great political divide – Guardian-style:

Yes, an “always Labour” politics teacher clashes with a GP who votes “Labour every general election.” No crockery was thrown, you’ll be astounded to hear. To spare you the unbearable suspense, both dislike Mr Trump. That’s pretty much it. Both ordered cocktails and had “a really positive experience” chatting to the other. Or, in effect, to themselves.

Really getting to the bottom of things.

Previously in the world of vastly different people with vastly different views:

The Guardian series Dining Across The Divide, in which supposedly contrasting characters thrash out their differences, should any materialise at some point, is credited to Zoe Williams, whose mouthings have proved so inadvertently entertaining to regulars of this parish.

From the Stage pages of the Guardian, a reminder of which concerns – and by extension which citizens – simply don’t matter:

As if the issue weren’t already foremost in a great many minds, perhaps due to unhappy first-hand experience. Note, too, the conflation of migrants and refugees. As if those arriving in vast numbers, welcome or otherwise, legally or not, were some homogenous mass of human sorrow, and thus, rather conveniently, impossible to refuse.

Readers are welcome to marvel at the conceit that objections to current policy – an effectively borderless nation – can only be the result of ignorance. No other possibilities being conceivable, it seems. And so, the flow of information, of views to be considered, and any expectations of listening, seem likely to travel in one direction only.

Readers will also note the assumption that the indigenous proletariat – those low-status citizens daring to be angry at the downgrading of their home – merely need to have their objections corrected. By drama of a very particular kind. As if concerns regarding rapid demographic transformation and a loss of cultural common ground could only ever be wrong.

As if there were no substance to their fears. No basis for their anger or sense of betrayal. As if it weren’t their neighbourhoods, not those of the luvvie set, being transformed rapidly and against their will – and very often for the worse.

As if they simply have to be told in a slightly different way.

A curious definition of an issue being opened up.

Whether our award-winning actor would be quite so enthusiastic about a compelling drama conveying the “emotional story” and “day-to-day realities” of someone whose home has been degraded and made alienating by the assumptions of people much like Mr Pryce remains unclear.

Though readers are welcome to guess.

Update, via the comments:

EmC adds,

Indeed. It’s not as if feelings on the matter have not been made clear, many times, quite loudly. Governments have been ousted because of this issue. And it’s not as if the consequences of ignoring those feelings are particularly difficult to foresee. Yet somehow the option of just doing as you’ve been told doesn’t appear on the form.

Mr Pryce and his peers seem to imagine that they live in a society without practical limits, or any troublesome human nature, as if the patience of those on whom these demographic fantasies are being imposed were infinite. As if no ugliness could ensue.

The idea that there may be very real physical constraints on some favoured policy – that reality may not comply with half-baked theory – seems entirely alien to those who would lecture us on our ignorance.

Says Rafi,

The disconnect – the inability to read the room – is quite something. And so very Guardian.

It scarcely needs saying that Mr Pryce, like so many of his likeminded peers, is unlikely to find his own neighbourhood enlivened by Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose modes of expression involve machetes, a tool now fashionable in educational establishments, and I doubt that he’ll find his own doorstep literally being shat on.

And I think we can assume that Mr Pryce has no recent first-hand experience of public transport and the, shall we say, challenges it can now present.

Likewise, I think it’s safe to say that Mr Pryce has not had the experience of visiting a busy high-street optician and realising that he was the only white customer, the only one fluent in English, and the only one paying for their treatment. Now, you might think that people shouldn’t notice such things or draw any conclusions from them, because that would be beastly and mean or something.

But people will, and people do, and wishing otherwise is both immaterial and perverse.

The irony being that those like Mr Pryce, who wish to project an air of piety and kindness, of infinite caring – entirely at others’ expense and while in reality disdaining their own countrymen – are risking a society much less to their own liking. And possibly yours.

A multicultural, multiracial society very much depends on the host population not feeling too imposed upon. The natives must feel respected and secure, not – as is now the case – that the piss is being taken. If the percentage of newcomers rises too high, or too sharply, or with no regard for assimilation and cultural common ground, friction will ensue and rapidly escalate.

The rate at which new arrivals materialise, their sheer numbers, will have an effect on how well, or how poorly, those new arrivals adapt to the customs and values of the host society. Indeed, it will have an effect on whether those new arrivals feel inclined, or obliged, to make any such attempt.

And at the moment we’re way past the point at which the alarm started flashing. And the longer that friction continues, and the more that the concerns of the natives are dismissed or denounced or made taboo, the uglier the pushback is likely to be.

Again,

And so, we arrive at the claim that a suitably loaded drama, a fiction, about refugees “could defuse anti-migrant anger,” because “people aren’t aware of the facts and realities for people living in migrant hotels.” As if that would outweigh all of the things, seen daily, that we’re not supposed to consider. Or consider important. Things regarding which one might have an opinion.

As Rmok and others note in the comments, what Mr Pryce advocates does seem very much about putting a thumb on the scale. As revealed by the implied disregard for indigenous objections – the assumption that objections to being swamped with the flotsam of the world, or suddenly being reduced to a racial and cultural minority in one’s own neighbourhood or village, one’s own home, is something to be educated out of you.

By your betters and their stories.

In discussions of Net Zero, I’ve previously mentioned the pleasingly hard-nosed energy analyst Kathryn Porter.

Here she is being interviewed by the chaps at Triggernometry:

This Isn’t Science, It’s Ideology – Kathryn Porter

Watch the full episode with @KathrynPorter26, right here on X. pic.twitter.com/SLQB9l9Evb

— TRIGGERnometry (@triggerpod) September 28, 2025

It’s ninety minutes, but time well spent and dense with information. Much of it of an eye-widening kind.

Ms Porter’s YouTube channel can be found here.