My father once sent me to a neighbor to borrow a left-handed monkey wrench. I was five or so, and believed my father needed this strange device. The neighbor, understanding the ruse, gently told me that all monkey wrenches worked whether the user employed his right or left hand. I returned and promptly told my Dad. He smiled and thanked me for my effort. He added that perhaps next time it might be good to question a request from others. Did a request make sense? I can still feel the warm blush of shame that covered my face.
During her 2010 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s solicitor general and former Dean of the Harvard Law School, created a stir in legal circles by stating, “We are all originalists.” Of course, she was correct but not as commonly understood. She was being honest, but not in the way the true believers—whether liberal or conservative—feared or wished. Continue reading →
Remember the many times we were outraged at the police denying people the right to take video of their actions in public? It was against the law, they claimed. They arrested people for doing so. They seized their phones. They deleted the video. It was outrageous, wrong and nothing more than an obvious ploy to conceal their misconduct from scrutiny.
“YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM!” is a cry you hear incessantly at protests in Portland, Oregon, always shouted at close range to your face by after-dark demonstrators. You can assert that, yes, you can film; you can point out that they themselves are filming incessantly; you can push their hands away from covering your phone; you can have your phone record them stealing your phone—all of these things have happened to me—and none will have any impact on their contention that “YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM” and its occasional variation, “PHOTOGRAPHY EQUALS DEATH!”
Looting is justified as reparations to the oppressed. Burning stores and buildings is justifed as imposing a cost on those who disagree, making their capitulation less costly than their disapproval. Neither withstands minimal rational scrutiny, and only the truest of believers buy the sophistic and fallacious arguments, not that they’re reluctant to spew them so others conclusively know they’re fools.
Prefatory note: I met up with someone using the handle “BlueDragon34” on my Discord server last week who informed me “StickyWeeks” is currently in jail awaiting trial for his brave efforts in bringing us transparency in law enforcement communications. “Dragon,” as I call my new ally, swore to carry on Sticky’s work. Apparently the Dragon delivers—CLS
July 29, 2020 FROM: Templeton, Roy ([email protected]) TO: ALL DEPARTMENTS RE: McNally Protocols Lifting
The time was 4:38 pm on September 2nd when local NBC reporter Mark Seagraves broke the new on twitter.
BREAKING: Possible police involved shooting 200 blk Orange St SE. multiple sources say “hostile crowd forming” in area where person was shot. @nbcwashington
While he used the dreaded phrase “police involved shooting,” the passive vagary that conceals the fact that he meant a cop shot a person, he offered nothing to suggest what happened or why beyond a person being shot. Yet, there it was. “Hostile crowd forming.” And the call to arms was seized upon by Black Lives Matter DC. Continue reading →
If Fox News polls tell the story, Trump is going to lose. Whether that happens remains a product of what happens on the streets and what comes out of his twitter feed, a battle for who can turn people off harder and faster, albeit each in their own special way.
But the day is still young, and there’s so much opportunity for either side to do something so outrageously awful. But there is a disconnect here, as Trump suffers from his own actions while Biden is tainted by the actions of others, who don’t like him, won’t listen to him and see him as the next hurdle to surmount in their quest for hegemony. Jonah Goldberg explains why. Continue reading →
Not too long ago, I decided not to publish a post that questioned our promiscuous use of the word “heroes.” Were people heroes for doing the job they chose to do, were paid to do, were supposed to do? If it was a hard job under the circumstances, a job that many of us would have chosen not to do, but still needed done, then we appreciated that people did the job. They could have walked away. They didn’t. We were the beneficiaries of their efforts.
But did that make them heroes? Did calling them heroes cheapen the word? Maybe we are just in desperate need of heroes, and so we turn regular people into heroes for being regular people. In any event, it seemed unwise at a time when passions were high to raise a thoughtful question that was likely to evoke outrage and a backlash. So it never saw the light of day.
The other day, there was a rally in Kenosha where the father of Jacob Blake spoke. Had his son not been shot by a cop, who would have cared what this random guy had to say? Who would have allowed him to speak? Who would have listened, not that anyone was really listening anyway. But he spoke because his son was shot. Getting shot does not make you a hero. Or a saint. Or a villain. Or anything except the guy who got shot. And being the shot guy’s father doesn’t make you someone with something useful to say.
As a father, I feel the pain of another parent whose child was harmed. Whether they deserved it or not, or whether the word “deserve” has nothing to do with it, as in a child who was harmed, killed, by some entirely random event like a car crash, the pain to a parent doesn’t change. Jacob Blake’s father felt the bullets going into his son’s body, and I can feel empathy for his pain. But he’s still no expert on the wrongfulness of what happened, and he’s got no greater gravitas than anyone else as to what should be done about it.
Inexplicably, the woke have beatified their victims. George Floyd has been made a saint, even though he wasn’t exactly a saint when he as alive. Did getting killed make him a better person or just a dead person? Did this guy whose existence registered on no one’s radar before he had the grave misfortune to die at the hands of police become an icon because of his personal virtue or being some random guy who died?
People have been put on pedestals not because they have any specialized knowledge of social problems or their solutions, but because they are victims, or somewhat closely related to victims. Some of them have sought out the opportunity to use their grave misfortune to elevate their voice far beyond its merit had they not been victims. Others have been thrust into the spotlight by others, whether because they can be used to serve their purposes, they believe it’s the right thing to do or they can bask in the reflected glory of victimhood.
People who have suffered are often not equipped to deal with the spotlight, or those pushing them into it or putting on them. They find themselves suddenly subjected to extreme scrutiny, whether accurate or not, that comes back to smear them and tear them off the pedestal they never wanted. They find themselves enjoying the limelight a bit too much, desiring more attention and bootstrapping their sudden fame into a position of prominence they’ve done nothing to deserve. Being a victim doesn’t take skill or effort. It’s not a virtue.
What drives us to turn ordinary people, maybe sinners but rarely terrible sinners, into heroes for the world to adore, to admire, to honor? We put them onstage. Their words make headlines. Hundreds, even thousands, of people take their words to heart and feel as if their thoughts, their words, their pain, should somehow exert an influence over our thoughts, our actions, our policies. Why?
George Floyd’s brother, Philonise, spoke before the House Judiciary Committee on June 10th.
It makes for good theater, but is Philonise Floyd knowledgeable, no less an expert, about police practices and accountability? Indeed, he can’t even speak to the killing of his brother as he wasn’t there and knows nothing more about it than anyone else who watched the video of Floyd’s death, and likely far less than those of us familiar with police procedure and capable of reading autopsy reports.
It may “feel” right, because he’s George Floyd’s brother, but it makes no sense. As much as we can empathize with his loss, or from the flip side, ponder why he didn’t do anything to stop his brother’s drug use and less than admirable conduct on the street, he’s just a random fellow whose brother was killed. No better or worse. No more worthy of offering his views than any other random person.
Much of this can be attributed to our rejection of reason and replacement with emotion. The victims bring a story, and their story evokes feelings. If their story, and the feelings they evoke, further what our feelings have to say, then we’re all for their elevation to sainthood, to importance, to prominence atop the pedestal. Some will say they need a hero, particularly given a broadbased movement devoid of leadership and purpose. This person at the microphone gives us someone to focus our attentions on when there is mostly chaos around us otherwise.
But as much as we can empathize with the loss and pain of victims and their families, and we might feel the need for a hero, the desire for a focal point, they still have no actual merit beyond having the great misfortune of being the victim. Any idiot can be shot or choked. That doesn’t make them someone to heed, and there’s nothing heroic about being some random guy killed.
Who doesn’t love mandatory minimums and the Sentencing Guidelines, amirite? Except for the fact that they’ve proven unduly Draconian, inflexible and too often produce absurd outcomes. But as hard as we’ve fought against rubrics that make criminal punishment clear, transparent and certain, there remains a bone in our heads that compels us to make the same mistakes again because, as much as we know the outcomes are terrible, they satisfy our desire for clarity.
“We want discipline to be a straightforward matter,” de Blasio said at a press conference. “We want it to be clear that when certain actions are taken, when certain mistakes are made, that there will be accountability.” Continue reading →
Forget the tu quoque comparisons to Trump, who did exactly what one would expect him to do.
“The violence is fueled by dangerous rhetoric from far-left politicians that demonize our nation and demonize our police,” Mr. Trump said Monday at a news conference. “The violent rioters share Biden’s same talking points, and they share his same agenda for our nation,” he added. “The rioters and Joe Biden have a side — they’re both on the side of the radical left.”
To suggest that Biden has given solace to rioters is clearly false. But then, Biden’s policy goals are far more aligned with the protesters than Trump’s, and while Trump has grossly overstated the case, has Biden been left to thread the needle between condemning violence without offending the violent? Continue reading →
There was only one full-time black journalist at the Kenosha News. Why that was the case is unknown, and any attempt to “explain” it would be nothing less than outright fabrication born of bias. Now, there are none. To his credit, the one black reporter, Daniel Thompson, saw something he couldn’t tolerate. After attempting to fix it, and being rebuffed, he did the only honorable thing he could do. He quit.
The headline, which appeared on the Kenosha News website on Saturday, highlighted a remark from one rally participant: “Kenosha speaker: ‘If you kill one of us, it’s time for us to kill one of yours.’” The online version of the article included a 59-second video showing the person who spoke those words, a Black man who was not identified by name.
The story was otherwise fine. It was the headline that offended Thompson. Continue reading →
