Category Archives: Crime

UPDATE II: Adam Lanza: EVIL, NOT ILL (Guns; There They Go Again)

Crime, Family, GUNS, Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason

It is at times like this, when news comes of the murder of 20 children and 7 adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., that I miss my dear friend and intellectual soul-mate Tom Szasz, RIP, more than ever.

One of the last emails he wrote to me—he was a constant in my life for years—was dated Fri 6/29/2012 5:52 PM. It was a response to one of mine. I had complained (kvetched, as we older Jews would say) about the loss of “wisdom, shophia.” He wrote back using the beautiful Greek concept I had invoked.

“As you know I have done that (and so have you). But this is what passes for wisdom now.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/15/abdul-awkal-deemed-mentally-unfit_n_1600273.html
So be it.
Love, Tom.”

Like all brilliant men, Tom was pessimistic. Reality warranted a pessimism of the deepest kind, something we shared. Tom was alluding to the dominant narrative in the Zeitgesit about evil, and the attendant error of medicalizing misconduct.

That ritual has begun. Once again, the true “Mad Hatters”—the self-serving tele-experts, twits of psychology and psychiatry—have gone into high gear.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the exculpation industry has taken its perennial position. And it is that of placing wicked behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their “therapeutic” interventions.

To listen to the nation’s psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not committed. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to their dirty deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease. The Drew Pinskys of the world conjure so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals.

The paradox at the heart of this root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances. These liberals (including most conservatives, who are now liberals in all but name) acknowledge human agency if—and only if—adaptive actions are involved.

As the psychiatric shaman has it, a killer is not evil, but ill. The modern-day witch doctor’s potions can thus exorcise evil, as evil is merely a manifestation of organic disease. Just like cancer.

UPDATE I: CORRECTION. The shooter’s name is Adam Lanza. Media initially named Ryan Lanza, the “suspect’s older brother,” because A. Lanza may have been carrying his brother’s identity document.

UPDATE II: GUNS: THERE THEY GO AGAIN. Displays of evil invariably elicit calls to ban or restrict certain firearms, as these are seen as part of causality. If you’re going to look for root causes, look for the right root causes. I’d look in the direction of permissive, child-centered, progressive parenting, which is conducive to the creation of narcissistic personalities. Progressive, indulgent, child-obsessed parenting is practiced by “conservatives” and liberals alike.

An acrimonious divorce, where the young man was alienated from a father by the Courts, by the mother or by the father himself, or by all the above: these could go toward the making of a monster. However, anti-gun, progressive interests dominate the media, and so one is less likely to hear a rational debate about the role of permissive parenting—where the child is encouraged to think that the universe does and should orbit around him—and the breakdown of the traditional family, in the creation of these monsters.

Here is something I fished out of the Mercer Articles Archive, dated … 2000. The Calgary Herald article I wrote quotes Canadian Professor Marilyn Bowman:

“The prototype aggressor,” explains Bowman, “is a man whose self-appraisal is unrealistically positive.” Like all efforts to drum up ignorance, this one can be dangerous.
“…every kind of social problem is analyzed as the outgrowth of low self esteem,” and while “treatment programs to teach people how to love themselves are put forward as the means of raising self-esteem,” not only is “the relationship between emotion and well being not robust, causal or meaningful,” but, on the contrary, there is a dark side to self-esteem.

The International Criminal Court: Good For Thee, But Not For Me

Bush, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Europe, Federalism, Justice, Law, States' Rights

George W. Bush is likely nervous about traveling to Europe lest the International Criminal Court (ICC) put him in the dock to answer for Iraq and other war crimes.

In the spirit of American national sovereignty, Republicans have rejected ICC jurisdiction. As James Orr of the London Telegraph notes, Republicans do not believe the ICC should be supported by America.

Lo and behold, Mr. Romney promised, Monday, to “make sure that Ahmadinejad is indicted under the Genocide Convention. His words amount to genocide incitation. I would indict him for it.”

Is this some new neoconservative trope? And what of the wacky A-Jad’s right of free speech? I was under the impression that so-called conservatives were all for the right to offend, as they should.

Although Bush would likely reject the possibility of the ICC’s jurisdiction over himself, he did not hesitate to call on the World Court to subvert Texas justice.

“W,” who would wrestle a crocodile for a criminal alien, ordered Texas to halt the execution of murderer and rapist José Medellín. Texas said NO, and ended Medellin’s miserable life. (Celebrated in “José Medellín’s Dead; Cue The Mariachi Band.”)

Bush used the ICC to rationalize treason against Texans. Romney hasn’t gone that far. But he seems to be indicating that he’ll join forces with global government when it suits him.

UPDATED: Mindless Response To Mine Massacre (In South Africa)

Crime, Democracy, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa, The West

“Mindless Response To Mine Massacre” in South Africa is the current column, now on RT. Here’s an excerpt:

“… You’d have had to experience the onrush of a riled-up African crowd to comprehend the terror among these frightened, likely incompetent, cops entrusted with defending mine operators and other staff still at the site. The last would have endured hours, if not days, of menacing chanting, singing, stomping, all amplified through loudspeakers.

Likewise, the besieged police at Sharpeville [in 1960] would have been petrified, as the ‘unarmed’ mob brandishing pangas, spears and sticks, advanced on their isolated outpost and breached the station’s fence, at the eponymous African township.

In both instances, the cops—white and black, then and now, right or wrong—fought to stay alive.

The media mob has already cut some slack to the black cops who were assailed at Marikana by 3000 miners. The frightened, outnumbered fellows at Sharpeville, who confronted 5,000 to 7,000 frenzied protesters: They’ve been condemned for eternity.

Sharpeville’s ‘villains’ had also attempted to control the crowds with tear gas and batons before that fateful shooting.

Why not ask 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis what a tribe armed with indigenous weapons is capable of doing to a despised, helpless ‘Other’?

Ask the same of some 4000 white South Africans farmers, who once helped feed the continent.

Or, closer to home, let an all-American lass, Amy Elizabeth Biehl, tell you how furious her white skin and good intentions made an ‘unarmed’ crowd, back in Cape Town of 1993.

Silly me. Question those Tutsis—whose blood turned the Kigara River red—all you like, but they will not reply. For they were torn asunder or macheteed by their longtime Hutu neighbors.

Ask the late Ms. Biehl about her ordeal, but she too has been silenced—stabbed and stoned, by an ‘unarmed’ mob with murder on its mind.

As to the 4000 (and counting) Boers—they’re dead and buried too. Interred in the land they had farmed for centuries; culled like springbok on a hunting safari by the same, disarming, inadvertent enemies of peace and prosperity.

In a world awash in floating fiat currency, demand for platinum will remain consistent and predictably high, even as production plummets in one of platinum’s prime producers, South Africa.

That’s guaranteed.

The miners of Marikana told Time magazine that they would not return to work until their wages were doubled (poor productivity be damned). Any scab who stepped in to do ‘their’ jobs would be eliminated. Or so they promised.

And that’s one other thing you can take to the bank. …”

Read the rest of “Mindless Response To Mine Massacre.” It’s now on RT.

Also available from WND or from Amazon is the prophetic “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid.”

Read the editorial reviews.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY:

At the WND and RT Comments Sections, and on Facebook.

By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” WND’s “Return To Reason” , and RT’s “Paleolibertarian Column.”

UPDATE (9/1/012): JD Hicks@Jdhickspi encapsulates the realities to which my column speaks (on Twitter):

“@IlanaMercer @RT_com Great perspective.most people have never experienced the existential,visceral threat of an agitated hostile mob.”

The Professional Drunk-Driver Immigration Visa

Crime, Criminal Injustice, IMMIGRATION, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Outsourcing, Reason

America’s much-coveted, Professional, Drunk-Driver Immigration Visa demands killer qualifications. But do not apply for it unless you are “a person of color,” undereducated and well-connected.

Ramon Hernandez, a recipient of this visa, is a four-time repeat offender, who (allegedly) killed little Dimitri Smith, in-utero. The deceased preemie was shown on CNN, being held by young mother Aileen Smith, before being laid to rest.

RIP, precious Dimitri.

“He should have been kept off the streets,” intoned CNN’s bimbo anchor, Brooke Baldwin.

Not one word was uttered—or allowed?—during today’s CNN segment about the fact that the man was not supposed to be in this country. It’s simple: Had Hernandez been THERE (in Mexico, presumably), chances are that Dimitri would have been HERE (with his parents).

Teletwits of amnesty such as Geraldo Rivera and Tamar Jacoby have argued again and again that the illegality of such perps—or, put more respectfully, holders of the Professional Drunk-Driver Immigration Visa—is irrelevant to the crime. “It’s not an illegal-alien story; it’s a drunk-driving story,” Geraldo once noodled on “The Factor.”

Geraldo was serious, although he should not be taken seriously. For their crushingly stupid claim to stick, Geraldo/Jacoby would have to demonstrate that, had this drunk, illegal alien been stopped at the border or been deported, his victims would have nevertheless suffered the same fate. Death, in Dimitri’s case.

As far as our CNN idiot was concerned, hers was a scoop, for she was able to seal the segment with that most penetrating of questions, pioneered by The Oprah-Anderson (as in Winfrey and Cooper) School of Journalism:

“Could you, Aileen Smith (mother of Dimitri), ever forgive Ramon Hernandez?”