Category Archives: Crime

Don’t Conflate The Michael Brown And Eric Garner Cases

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Paleolibertarianism, Race, Racism

Not only the “basics of anatomy and breathing,” in the words of the New York Times’ editorial board, were flouted in “taking down” of Eric Garner, who was doing nothing naturally illicit when he was tackled and placed in the chokehold that killed him.

Flouted too was the humanity, empathy and the most primitive, basic intelligence in dealing with a man who was struggling to breathe. As a mother of an asthmatic, I know that you do not mess with a person’s oxygen supply. Garner’s manner of death, by the way, conjures the manner in which the fragile Carol Anne Gotbaum (a petite 45-year-old, who weighed 105 pounds) met an untimely demise. Gotbaum was likely asphyxiated in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor by a few corpulent cops.

That said, here are the salient factors to bear in mind:

* The cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner: never the twain shall meet. On the facts, the incidents are entirely different. This the tape of Eric Garner’s last moments shows in abundance. The evidence of police wrongdoing there is incontrovertible. Evidence shows exactly the opposite in the case of Brown.

* Garner was a victim of the police (not so Brown). But racism? Nonsense on stilts! Racism is the cudgel with which the “Racism-Industrial-Complex” hits whitey about the head to keep sissified WASPs in line. For the most, the masses marching against the Garner homicide are, as interviews demonstrate, so dumb, they can’t much articulate why they are marching.

* Cops are equal opportunity offenders: They aggress against whites more or less equally, factoring into account the disproportionate representation of blacks among the population of law-breakers. (Except that whites don’t march.) Warns John Lott:

If you’re going to correctly compare the rates at which police kill black and white male teenagers, you have to compare teenage crime rates. You can’t just compare crime rates among the entire black and white populations. The rate that these teenagers commit murder, not including rape and other less serious crimes, also provides a somewhat better measure of the perceived threat that they might pose to police.
Among blacks, teenage crime is much more prevalent. Based on the most recent available FBI crime numbers, black male teenagers were nine times more likely to commit murder than were their white counterparts. That’s right, nine times, and the gap in these urban areas is undoubtedly even larger.
After adjusting for murder rates, black male teenagers are still killed by the police 2.3 times as often as whites. This is a considerable difference — but again, over-representation of urban areas in the data set could be a big part of the explanation.

* Whites practice universalism. They march against injustice, real or perceived, perpetrated against blacks. Not so blacks. Blacks are the quintessential tribal racialists.

* Laws that criminalize naturally licit trade kill. Garner was selling his own loose cigarettes on a street corner. (He had just “helped to break up a fight on [that] busy street in Staten Island.” ) Such items are contraband in the City:

Last January, the city passed stronger penalties for selling loosies and other illegal cigarettes and in early July, reports the Daily News. The NYPD’s Chief of Department, Philip Banks, specifically called for crackdowns on loosie sales in Staten Island. “Among the specific public complaints of illegal activity in that area included the sale of untaxed cigarettes as well as open (alcohol) container and marijuana use and sale offenses,” an NYPD spokesman told the News.

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Had Garner’s conduct not been criminalized by the criminals of today’s Tammany Hall, he’d be alive.

On Michael Brown, Libertarians Line-Up Like Mainstream

Crime, libertarianism, Media, Paleolibertarianism

With the exception of Professor Walter E. Block, libertarians, lite and hard-core, have lined-up like a monolith—much as mainstream media has—on the side of conspiracy and counteract, in the matter of Michael Brown’s shooting by Darren Wilson. (At least Reason.com has been willing to entertain differences of opinion.) Broad patterns of police transgression exist. However, each “cop killing” must be decided on the merits of the facts. Regrettably, this libertarian column had also expressed the opinion that Brown was the victim of “murder-by-cop.” I was wrong and have corrected myself.

Mentor and friend Walter Block did not fall in lockstep. Here’s the lovely comment received after the publication of “Ferguson: Thankful for Founding Fathers’ Legal Legacy”:

Dear Ilana:

Yet another eloquent, beautifully argued, magnificently written article, greatly informed by a libertarian sense of justice. Congratulations once again.

Best regards,

Walter

Walter E. Block, Ph.D.
Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics
Joseph A. Butt, S.J. College of Business
Loyola University New Orleans

Joel Pollak Knows Diddlysquat About South Africa, Old & New

Crime, Democracy, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, South-Africa

Some pipsqueak, Joel Pollak, has written a deeply silly, short, insubstantial piece about South Africa. “Blue State Blues: My Immigrant Father’s Warning—’When Illegality Becomes the Law'” is sufficiently shallow, ahistoric and counterfactual to elicit emotions at Breitbart.com, without taxing critical thinking. Pollak, who should know better as he is from South Africa, is an example of the convergence of American liberalism and conservatism. Conservatism in the US is leftism by any other name, when it comes to most things, but especially South Africa.

More people are murdered in a week under Democracy than were murdered by the National Party over 40 years of rule. Read Dan Rood’s response.

Joel Pollak Knows Squat About South Africa, Old & New
By Dan Roodt

Joel Pollak’s article is just way off the mark in every respect. What Obama’s executive decree on immigration has got to do with South Africa is a complete mystery. If anything, Obama’s actions are a lot closer to what Pollak’s parents did, trashing a country that had nurtured and educated them in favour of the unknown and siding with radical liberals and communists seeking the overthrow of the legal government of South Africa.

The number of people who “disappeared” during forty years of Afrikaner rule from 1948 to 1994 may be counted on one hand and those who were victims of police brutality like Steve Biko were immortalized by the hysterical liberal media. Those same media ignored the car bombs on the streets or in restaurants planted by terrorists sponsored by the ex-Soviet Union, East Germany and the equally crazy Sweden.

Terrorism is still an international crime. Terrorism and disinformation brought South Africa to its knees. One of the first things that the new revolutionary government did in 1994 was to abolish all forms of border control, letting our country be swamped by illegal immigrants. Our legal system which used to be far better and more efficient than in most Western countries, scrupulously maintained by well-trained and professional jurists, has been perverted by an anti-white constitution and activist liberal judges who abolished the death penalty and introduced same-sex marriage against the will of all the people, white and black.

The same liberal screamers in the media who excoriated police action against terrorists and communist revolutionaries in South Africa are now completely silent about the 700 people who die annually in police custody or the 15% of police who have criminal records. Not to forget the 77 homicides taking place every day. Since the advent of so-called “democracy” in South Africa – which is little more than mob rule – over 500 000 people have been murdered, between 15 and 20 million women have been raped and our major cities have become the equivalent of Detroit.

South Africa used to be a pillar of Western civilization. Betrayed by the likes of Mr. Joel Pollak and his parents, it has now become a kind of science-fiction dystopia where up to 500 people are murdered annually for body parts to be used in black magic potions, while you order your “medicine” from your witchdoctor on a mobile phone. There are Ferguson-style riots and protests almost every day, routinely ignored by the liberal MSM as they consider rioting a normal function of “democracy.”

This very afternoon there were blackouts all over the country as our once proud electrical utility, Eskom, ruined by corruption, mismanagement, theft and race preferences (“affirmative action”), is struggling to keep the grid running.

As Ilana Mercer warns in her prescient book “Into The Cannibal’s Pot”, the USA is at risk of following in South Africa’s footsteps. A minority of ultraliberals and communists will assemble voting cattle from across your borders, whip them up with racial and ethnic resentment against traditional white Americans, and then rule forever while pillaging your country.

The recipe has already been applied in South Africa and the utter devastation is there for all to see.

*****

DAN ROODT, Ph.D., is a noted Afrikaner activist, author, literary critic and director of PRAAG (which features my weekly column). He is the author of the polemical essay, “The Scourge of the ANC”.

Black Caesar, Black AG

Conflict, Crime, Law, Race, Racism

Other than interfering with the decision of Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to declare a state of emergency in Ferguson, on the eve of the grand jury’s decision in the matter of Michael Brown, as well as instructing local law enforcement authorities in “proper” policing, not to mention inserting himself qua long-suffering black man into the narrative of oppression—the attorney general of black America, Eric Holder, delivered these not-so veiled introductions, Friday:

* To Police: “It is vital to engage in planning and preparation, from evaluating protocols and training to choosing the appropriate equipment and uniforms.” (How about adding garlands around the neck, Hawaii-style?)

* Guess whose side the AG is on: The “demonstrations and protests … have sought to bring attention to real and significant underlying issues involving police practices, implicit bias, and pervasive community distrust.”

* Listen-up, you “nation of cowards,” hurry up and change your errant ways: “… demonstrations like these have the potential to spark a sustained and positive national dialogue, to provide momentum to a necessary conversation, and to bring about critical reform.”

* “… progress will not come easily, and long-simmering tensions will not be cooled overnight. These struggles go to the heart of who we are, and who we aspire to be [an Obama oft-repeated cliché], both as a nation and as a people—and it is clear that we have a great deal of important work to do.”

True to type, Holder has taken sides.

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