Category Archives: Crime

UPDATED: The Ferguson Report: The Best Of Pseudoscience (‘Disparate Impact Gambit’)

Affirmative Action, Crime, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Race, Racism

If, as TAWE (The Ass With Ears) would have it, and the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report “evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement”—then, by logical extension, the Civil Rights Movement was spawned by not much at all. Since we know this to be untrue, what do you suppose is missing from the Ferguson report, according to which there exists “‘a pattern or practice of’ racial bias in both policing and the court system, searches and seizures in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and interference with the free expression rights of all peaceful protesters”?

“African Americans experience disparate impact in nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system,” the report asserts.

Here’s what’s going on: To advance propaganda, pseudoscience must be deployed. After all, the Idiocracy will be none the wiser. Yes, black are more likely to be stopped by law enforcement than whites. But the Ferguson report fails to control for the fact that there are differences in rates of offense between blacks and whites (and Asian, by the way, who’re conveniently omitted from the “disparate impact” formula used by our racism-spotters).

Via InvestorsBusinessDaily:

“The Justice Department’s research arm, the National Institute of Justice, explains that differences in traffic stops can simply be attributed to ‘differences in offending.'”

But federal data compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that blacks violate traffic laws at higher rates than whites in every offense, including driving with an invalid license.
Yet Holder makes it sound as if Ferguson police target blacks at random for stops for no other reason than “driving while black,” and then pile on the tickets. …

It is one thing to demand that traffic and other laws be repealed because blacks are more likely to fall foul of them. (I certainly think drug laws should be repealed together with all unjust laws, irrespective.) But it is quite another thing to shout racism when blacks are stopped more frequently, because cops are obliged to enforce laws against offenders. People are sick of it.

UPDATE: The brilliant Heather Mac Donald on “The Disparate Impact Gambit”:

… Disparate-impact analysis obviates the need to find intentional discrimination in a civil-rights case; a policy or practice can be wholly color-blind, but if, in its application, it falls more heavily on a particular racial group, it is illegal under certain federal regulations. A job requirement that employees have a high-school degree is a classic example of a policy that has a disparate impact, if the high-school-degree requirement disqualifies more blacks than whites for the job. Never mind that the employer applies his job threshold without racial bias, he can be held liable for racial discrimination anyway if he is unable to justify the high-school requirement as a business necessity.

The Obama administration’s aggressive use of disparate-impact theory against schools for their disciplinary practices has been a disaster for classroom safety and order. That school-discipline crusade has meant that schools cannot remove unruly black students from the classroom under neutral behavioral codes without triggering potential legal liability, simply because more black students violate those codes. But as destructive as the application of disparate-impact theory to school authority has been, applying it broadly to law enforcement is a recipe for anarchy. There are few criminal laws that do not have a disparate impact on blacks, because the black crime rate is more elevated than the white crime rate.

MORE Mac Donald.

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Israel: Why So Safe

Crime, Israel, Neoconservatism, South-Africa

The positions advanced by the “American” Israel Firster, neoconservative fifth column are riddled with contradictions. On his Facebook Timeline, Jack Kerwick points to one of many such gaping inconsistencies.

Jack Kerwick: I don’t speak much of Israel. It’s just not one of my interests. But to hear some movement “conservatives” in the so-called “conservative” media speak, you’d swear that Israel is infallible, for never, ever, do they utter a so much as a peep’s worth of criticism of it. And any criticism aimed at it is abruptly dismissed as a function of “anti-Semitism.” Israel, we are incessantly told, faces an “existential threat” to its existence. But then such ardent Israel supporters as Dennis Prager and Mike Gallagher, while encouraging listeners to sign up for the trip to Israel that they will be hosting later in the year, swear that Israel is among the safest places on Earth, and certainly far safer than many AMERICAN cities. But I thought that it faces an “existential threat?” Can someone please tell me: What’s really going on here?

My reply:

The Israeli state protects its own, unlike the US. I suspect it’s because even politicians can’t emigrate with ease; and their kids must serve in the army as well. No exemptions. Israel, in fairness, is not like the US, where elites and dynastic families, as opposed to the natural aristocracy, run the show to their advantage. Moreover, crime rates are very low. Last I checked, for my book, death-by-murder rates in Israel were 3.7 per 100,000 for civilians only; 4.3 when soldiers were included. That is dazzlingly low—read “Exodus from SA to Israel”—a function, in part, of population composition; its homogeneity, etc., although this too is changing.

First The Packers’ Fan, Then The Pickup Line

Crime, Nationhood, Politics, Sport

So I’m out power walking up the hill, in the gentle precipitation characteristic of the sublime Pacific Northwest. (I have yet to resume running since knee pain struck in October.) Ahead of me a man walks his dog. Both look forlorn.

I’m powering ahead, trying to decompress because of a laundry list of stressors, of which the least pressing are Pete Carroll, Russell Wilson and “Beast Mode”:

Well, at least we have a better Chris Matthews to help supress the bile that rises whenever the wide receiver’s namesake on MSNBC makes an appearance. (The other, lesser Chris Matthews is host of “Hardball,” an apropos name, given Chris’s well-known carnal affections for Barack Obama. The man spent the first two years of the Obama presidency in a state of sexual delirium. The crappy, MSNBC Chris is famous for fessing up to experiencing something akin to a (daytime) nocturnal emission during Obama’s coronation—”thrill up the leg,” Matthews called the accident.)

I pass the gloomy dog and his owner. The latter asks me how I’m doing. I reply: “Seahawks sad.” The guy says, “Oh, I’m a Packer’s fan, so I’m doing OK.” By Wikipedia’s telling, “The Green Bay Packers are the last vestige of small town teams common in the NFL during the 1920s and 1930s.” The team members look good. I might switch allegiances.

So far I’ve rooted for my home team, the Hawks. Why? It occurred to me that the football fetish in the US has arisen in the context of a country whose inhabitants share very little other than The Game. The host country’s history and founding documents have been turned into a liability by its educrats. The language has been dumbed down and demoted as the number of non-English-speakers clamoring for official recognition for their respective tongues rises. And the faith that once united those who fought to establish the republic has been banished from the public square and confined to the shopping mall, where adherents shop for God until they drop.

As I neared the end of my walking route, a car that had driven past a few time stopped. I imagined the occupant needed directions and sidled up to his vehicle. I’m wearing a thin anorak and a Jews-for-the-Preservation-of-Firearms-Ownership cap.

A young man looks me over and asks, “Want a ride, honey?” Really? In a family friendly neighborhood, in perfectly pleasant weather? I’ve seem “them” grisly cases on Investigation Discovery—a big favorite, bar “The Americans” and “The Fall” (first season, especially)—where women get shoved into cars by crazies.

First the Packers’ fan; then the pickup line. Perhaps I should pack a pistol next time I go for a walk in the neighborhood?

The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability

Britain, Crime, Europe, Foreign Policy, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Islam, Jihad, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Media

“The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised is how progressives prefer to depict the Muslim murderers in their midst. After all, progressives hail from the school of therapeutic “thought” that considers crime to have been caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized and outsourced to state-approved experts, or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

The most famous advocate of the-Camel-Ate-My Homework theory of criminal culpability is Barack Obama. Obama’s flabby assumption has it that the poor barbarians of France’s burbs have been deprived of fraternité. “Europe needs to better integrate its Muslim communities,” lectured the president.

Also guilty of a social determinism that flouts their philosophy of individual freedom are libertarians. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society and libertarian saddle the state: U.S. foreign policy, in particular. A war of aggression, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and torture are thus “principal catalysts for this kind of non-state terrorism,” argued Ray McGovern.

“The-state-made-me-do-it” argumentation apes that of the left’s “society-made-me-do-it” argumentation. Both philosophical factions, left and blowback-libertarian, are social determinists, in as much as they implicate forces outside the individual for individual dysfunction.

Myself, I despise U.S. foreign policy as deeply as any Muslim. But it would never-ever occur to me to take it out on my American countrymen.

In the context of free will, and in a week in which we remember the Holocaust, Viktor E. Frankl rates a mention.

Dr. Frankl came out of Auschwitz to found the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. The philosopher and distinguished psychiatrist said this of his experience in the industrial killing complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau: “In the camps one lost everything, except the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

To plagiarize another Jews (myself): “You can see why liberals have always preferred Freud to Frankl [my family included]. They retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian fiction that traumatic toilet training is destiny.”

Dr. Frankl lost his beloved young wife in Auschwitz, yet told poignantly of finding her, if figuratively, in a tiny bird that flitted close by. If this man was able to discovered the reality of free will and human agency in a laboratory like Auschwitz; so too can Muslims find the will to respond adaptively to events that enrage them and are indeed unjust: Western foreign policy.

The idea that the Brothers Kouachi and thousands of their coreligionists in the West who’ve joined ISIS were driven by “disaffection” to do their diabolic deeds conjures a skit from the “Life of Brian,” John Cleese’s parody of Judea under Rome. …

… The complete column is “The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability.” Read the rest on WND.