Category Archives: Crime

UPDATE II: Racism Rhetoric Is Rubbish (Catchall Phrase For The Feeble-Minded)

Crime, Fascism, libertarianism, Race, Racism, Reason, South-Africa

Police brutality? Yes! Militarization of the police force? You bet! “A Government of Wolves”? Yes again, and worse! “The Rise of the Warrior Cop”? For sure! But racism? No! That’s bullshit. So why have some libertarians adopted this rhetoric? The same people who would argue against (color-coded) hate-crime legislation—and rightly so, for a crime is a crime—are suddenly accusing white America of racism (thought crimes).

Sheepishness? No doubt, but racism? Enough of this nonsense:

This doesn’t mean that racism is not also involved. Polls show that a majority of white Americans are content with the police justification for the killing. Police apologists are flooding the Internet with arguments against those of the opposite persuasion. Only those who regard the police excuse as unconvincing are accused of jumping to conclusions before the jury’s verdict is in. Those who jump to conclusions favorable to the police are regarded as proper Americans. …

Could it be that the ordinary Americans Paul Craig Roberts maligns as likely racists are really, truly waiting for more information, or suffer an authoritarian, submissive frame-of-mind, or are uninformed about “police state USA,” or have simply experienced “black crime” first hand, or are fearful of experiencing “black-on-white violence” in all it ferocity”?

UPDATE I (8/23): Et Tu, Stossel?

John Stossel mars a perfectly reasonable column, separating the “liberal from the libertarian response to Ferguson,” with a nod to the endemic racism meme:

Yes, centuries of white people abusing the civil liberties of blacks have left many blacks resentful of police power, and in recent years, white police officers have shot, on average, two young black men every week. But none of that justifies violence and looting like that which followed Michael Brown’s death. Criminals who ransack stores are always wrong to violate the rights of innocent third parties.

It reminds me of the root-causes excuse offered up by lily white liberals for the dysfunction of many young black South Africans, who were born well after the end of apartheid.

UPDATE II (8/24): Racism: The Catchall Phrase for the Feeble-Minded. Jack Kerwick explains why:

… anyone who is interested in thinking clearly and honestly must realize that “racism” is the rhetorical ware of bumper stickers and t-shirts: Because it means—and is intended to mean—all things to all people, it has become meaningless. All that we do know is that “racism” is a dreadful, probably the most dreadful thing, of which a white person can be accused.

Ebony, Ivory And No Harmony

BAB's A List, Crime, Education, Race

By Myron Pauli

Twenty years ago, I met a Yugoslavian physicist visiting MIT who assured all that Yugoslavia would not collapse into civil war and that only a few “kooks” were stirring up ethnic antagonism. It turned out he knew his quantum chromodynamics better than his kinsmen. Similarly, when I saw übercynic Fred Reed’s portents of civic collapse. It exceeded even my own pessimism. Next week, of course, was Ferguson, and Fred seems once again prophetic. Fred even specifically mentioned that the pervasive racism is in the “real world” and not in physics departments!

The issue of police militarization, of course, is a legitimate concern, even for Finnish libertarians who do not want to see their local trigger-happy cops armed for the Battle of the Bulge with hypermilitarized SWAT teams knocking down doors at 3:00AM. This is not, per se, a racial issue but a civil liberties issue.

However, when the local cops smash down Grandma O’Leary’s door at 3:00 AM to look for some pot and wind up shooting her dog and tasering granny, it is not likely that white people take to the streets and riot. While the all-pervasive black-on-white violence, like the torture/rape/murder spree of Reginald and Jonathan Carr, might have brought out the local Klan in the bad old days, most people let the criminal justice system, however flawed, take its course. One can certainly spot a white person mouthing racist vitriol but neo-fascist pogroms seem to be passé.

Now, let us switch to black victims of crime. Between the killing of Travon Martin and the exoneration of George Zimmerman, roughly 6,000 black Americans were killed by black Americans – not much protest. In that same interval, 400,000 black babies were aborted – presumably not all suffering from Down’s syndrome, Siamese twins, or major medical abnormalities – but not much protest. In Africa, we have the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Diamond Gangs in Sierra Leone, and other examples of mass rape, mass mutilations, and genocide. Remember Rwanda? Does anyone care about 5,400,000 killed in Civil War in the Congo ?

Perhaps the outrage is only due to cop-on-black violence. The bullet blitzkrieg that struck down 3 blacks leaving a strip club in Queens looked like it might go viral. However, the first cop to start the blitzkrieg against Sean Bell and his drunk pals, Gerald Isnora, was himself black – hence, nothing to get upset over! Would anyone have cared if Travon Martin or Michael Bell were killed by a black drug dealer or a rival boyfriend? However, if the shooter is white, then it is time to take to the streets regardless of whether the facts have been established. Time for Al Sharpton to get on his horse like Paul Revere to shout “the whiteys are coming!”. Death is not required – even beating Rodney King or an auto accident that kills Gavin Cato in Crown Heights is enough to get the riots going and the subsequent looting of plasma TV’s from Costco. As Fred puts it, beneath the surface is a cauldron of hatred – as in the Crown Heights riots.

The relatively irrelevant “facts” that Bell and Martin may not have been saints does not imply that trigger-happy cops and cop-wannabees have some inherent authority to blast petty delinquents at will. Nevertheless, the fact that black racists make these unproven charges and that white racists “justify” them only shows the dreadful abyss into whihc this country has been heading.

I don’t recall the America of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era being so polarized. Electing Obama did not improve harmony and might have made things worse. Nor have 50 years of “Civil Rights Laws” helped the underclass – one mile away, Ballou High School in DC is officially “integrated” but it is over 98 percent black with only 20 percent of kids at grade level and zero students who have ever passed an Advanced Placement Course. The Chamber of Commerce prefers importing illegal aliens to hiring blacks. Anger begets paranoia and paranoia begets anger and guilt-tripped whites encourage more anger, while little gets solved waiting for the next incident and riots.

Yugoslavia?!

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

Trayvon Round II?

Crime, Law, Race

If the video of Michael Brown—the unarmed, black teenager who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri—roughing up and robbing a shopkeeper is authentic, Brown was no gentle giant; he was a brutal bully and worse.

The point being made by the entities Fred Reed dubs “talking heads with bargain-basement IQs,” however, is that the Brown captured by surveillance doing what seemed to come so naturally (intimidating and stealing) relates not at all to the Brown who got shot, because the cop who shot Brown knew nothing of the robbery in which the teen had partaken in the hour prior to his death.

This is not to justify the shooting, but to pose a question: Do we know for sure that the outed policeman did not get information over his car radio about a robbery in the vicinity?

The fact that the alleged perp (Michael Brown) knew he had committed a felony might well have changed the dynamics of the situation. If Brown had consciousness of guilt, he might well have acted in an aggressive manner; “done something an innocent person would not do.”

“The story smells,” writes Fred, who worked the cop beat as a journalist:

Reflect: Every white cop short of the orbit of Neptune knows that if he shoots a black, he faces dismemberment in the media, loss of job and pension, probable criminal charges locally by a publicity-seeking prosecutor, a well-funded civil suit that he can’t afford filed by surviving family members, and trumped-up federal civil-rights charges from an attorney general who doesn’t like whites.

The Tyrant’s Warring Factions

Constitution, Crime, Founding Fathers, John McCain, Media

I’m not quite convinced ordinary individuals should share the nation-wide outrage over the dispute between Congress, on the one hand, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on the other.

What’s it about? Explains AMY GOODMAN of “Democracy Now!”:

The Central Intelligence Agency has admitted its officials spied on a Senate panel probing the agency’s torture and rendition program. An internal probe found 10 CIA employees monitored Senate staffers’ computers. This development comes days after another revelation of CIAspying on Congress emerged. According to McClatchy, the agency has also been spying on emails from whistleblower officials and Congress, triggering fears the CIA has been intercepting the communications of officials who handle whistleblower cases.

This CIA infraction is said to “violate the constitutional separation of powers and may also have been a violation of a federal computer fraud.”

McMussolini is upset. He doesn’t much appreciate any upset in the balance of his power.

Seriously, separation of powers has become nothing but a slogan. Very little remains of the Founder’s constitutional scheme. The people who were supposed to benefit from the dispersion of power inherent in that scheme, now labor under a centralized power.

Isn’t it curious how much fuss is generated by the media-congressional faction when their rights and privileges are messed with? Forgotten in the self-serving din is the spying that goes on against the people. The people themselves forget and become distracted by the whining of those in power.

For all I care, the CIA and Congress can devour each other.