Category Archives: Law

Female Officer Doesn’t Know Her Revolver From Her Lipstick

Affirmative Action, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Feminism, Gender, Law

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The female officer who killed a man, because she reached for her service revolver instead of her taser, is another item in the case made in this column, “Systemic, Institutional Rot: From Big Freeze In Texas To Fires In Cali.”

Clearly, Kim Potter accidentally discharged her weapon. She did not mean to kill Daunte Wright.  This only strengthens the case against women in the force. This was a veteran officer, who had worked for the Brooklyn Center Police for 26 years!

In my opinion. Weapons are just not natural to us.

I say this as my one piece rests on my desk; I’m never without it. (I use a revolver precisely because I’m pretty clumsy, and my digits aren’t even strong enough to rack the slide. Revolvers are female-proof.)

The video of the incident that was circulated by police shows the officer shouting out “Taser, Taser, Taser” before shooting, and then appearing to realise she had used a handgun instead. The officer, Kim Potter, … has resigned, and been charged with second-degree manslaughter.

This is a case, to quote from the column, “ Systemic, Institutional Rot: From Big Freeze In Texas To Fires In Cali, “of systemic stupidity; systemic rot. …”

“Things start to fall apart when the best-person-for-the-job ethos gives way to racial and gender window-dressing and to the enforcement of politically pleasing perspectives.”

The American government is marred, at every level, with similar set-asides, preferential hiring practices and affirmative action, which compromise an already compromised institution (the State, where incentives are inverted, as in the less efficient they are, the more funds government departments get). MORE.

And now, a policewoman, probably a very decent lady, is in a terrible bind, her life having been destroyed.

*Image credit is here.

NEW COLUMN: Resist the Left’s Conflation of ‘Racism’ With the Law, for Chauvin and Beyond

Argument, Law, libertarianism, Liberty, Logic, Natural Law, Race, Racism, Reason

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NEW ON CNSNews.com: “Resist the Left’s Conflation of ‘Racism’ With the Law, for Chauvin and Beyond.”

An excerpt: https://tinyurl.com/3j6sdu5z

Racism consists of a mindset or a worldview that boils down to impolite and impolitic thoughts and words written, spoken, preached, or tweeted.

If that’s all racism is, you ask, then what was the knee on George Floyd’s neck? Was that not racism?

No, it was not.

Judging from the known facts, the knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck was a knee on a man’s neck. That’s all that can be inferred from the chilling video recording in which Floyd expired slowly as he pleaded for air.

Floyd begged to breathe. But the knee on his neck—“subdual restraint and neck compression,” in medical terms—was sustained for fully eight minutes and 46 seconds, causing “cardiopulmonary arrest.”

There are laws against what transpired between former Officer Derek Chauvin and Mr. Floyd.

And the law’s ambit is not to decide whether the offending officer is a correct-thinking individual, but whether Mr. Chauvin had committed a crime.

About Officer Chauvin’s mindset, the most the law is supposed to divine is mens rea—criminal intention: Was the officer whose knee pressed on Floyd’s neck acting with a guilty mind or not?

For fact-finding is the essence of the law. The law is not an abstract ideal of imagined social justice, that exists to salve sensitive souls.

If “racism” looks like a felony crime, then it ought to be prosecuted as nothing but a crime and debated as such. In the case of Mr. Chauvin, a mindset of depraved indifference seems to jibe with the video.

This is not to refute the reality of racially motivated crimes. These most certainly occur. It is only to refute the legal and ethical validity of a racist mindset in the prosecution of a crime.

Surely, a life taken because of racial or antisemitic animus is not worth more than life lost to spousal battery or to a home invasion.

The law, then, must mete justice, in accordance with the rules of evidence, proportionality and due process. Other than intent, references to the attendant thoughts that accompanied the commission of a crime should be irrelevant—be they racist, sexist, ageist or anti-Semitic.

Ultimately, those thoughts are known only to the perp….

… READ THE REST ON CNSNews.com: “Resist the Left’s Conflation of ‘Racism’ With the Law, for Chauvin and Beyond.”

*Image via CNS.News (Photo credit: Noam Galai/Getty Images)

George Floyd’s Cause Of Death: Clear. Chauvin’s Criminal Intention: Harder To Prove.

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Race, Racism

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“In the case of Mr. Derek Chauvin, a mindset of depraved indifference seems to jibe with the video of George Floyd’s expiration.” (From “Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!“)

Judging from the known facts, …  the chilling video recording in which Floyd expired slowly as he pleaded for air… Floyd begged to breathe. But the knee on his neck—“subdual restraint and neck compression,” in medical terms—was sustained for fully eight minutes and 46 seconds, causing “cardiopulmonary arrest.”

There are laws against what transpired between former Officer Derek Chauvin and Mr. Floyd.

And the law’s ambit is not to decide whether the offending officer is a correct-thinking individual, but whether Mr. Chauvin had committed a crime.

About Officer Chauvin’s mindset, the most the law is supposed to divine is mens rea—criminal intention: Was the officer whose knee pressed on Floyd’s neck acting with a guilty mind or not?

For fact-finding is the essence of the law. The law is not an abstract ideal of imagined social justice, that exists to salve sensitive souls. …

Considerations to tease apart are in, “Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!”

Comments from readers can be followed on this blog post: “UPDATED (8/22/): NEW COLUMN: Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!”

Derek Chauvin’s trial is live, on USA Today.

Open Sesame: The Piss-Poor ‘Conservative,’ Immigration Positions That Admit You Into Polite Company

Argument, Conservatism, Democrats, IMMIGRATION, Law, Republicans

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On the immigration front, the “Open Sesame” magical phrase that gets you into polite, conservative company is J. D Vance’s “True ‘Compassion’ Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration.”

Banal. Puke. Yawn.

“True ‘Compassion’ Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration” is the typically bankrupt, conciliatory, “conservative” argument we’ve come to expect from these quarters, regarding America’s promiscuously loose  immigration policy, under Republicans and Democrats alike.

First, the “moral” preening component: “All’s I’m saying, you folks, comes out of the goodness of my hillbilly heart.”

For the second point, allow me to excerpt from my “Immigration Scene,” written in 2006 (has anything changed? why vote?):

Everyone (and his dog) currently concurs that we have no problem with legal immigration, only with the illegal variety. It’s now mandatory to pair an objection to the invasion of the American Southwest with an embrace of all forms of legal immigration.

Vance opposes the rot of our immigration reality simply because he’s so kind, diverse and open, but still law-abiding.

Note the name-dropping from our hoedown Hillbilly, a member of the elite by any other name:

“… my friend (and my wife’s former boss) Brett Kavanaugh [of the] Supreme Court...”

Ooh. Impressive. While Vance forgot to brag directly about having married an Indian-American lady, who “Rid Him of His Hillbilly Ways“; he brought her up indirectly while touting his elite credentials.

Then there’s the shtick that is the constant mentioning of his “working-class background.” Once they’ve “arrived” in the power zone; conservatives like Vance are as good at lefty elitists at assuring us of their (manifestly fake) authenticity.

By the way, Appalachian folks, whom Vance depicted in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, say justifiably that “Vance was not an authentic hillbilly or an example of the working class.”

Cassie Chambers Armstrong, an Appalachian and author of Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains, tells why her Aunt Ruth didn’t think much of JD Vance’s endeavor:

Hillbilly Elegy’s 

portrayal of Appalachia is designed to elevate Vance above the community from which he came. Remember that it seeks to tell his story in a way that aligns with a simplistic rags-to-riches narrative. Think critically about how that narrative influences the way we are taught to think about poverty, progress, and identity.

When all is said and done, J. D. Vance utters the code words at the door of the Establishment, Left and Right, when discussing immigration–and has been allowed in.

The right answer, the one J.D. Vance wouldn’t dare give, is this:

Vance and his phony conservative friends misplace compassion. Their job is not to flaunt their virtue to The World currently on its way to America.

True compassion demands that American politicians and policy makers stick strictly to their mandate—and that is looking out ONLY for their American constituents, and sending all the rest THE HELL HOME.  These politicians are hired hands: hired by the American electorate to do its bidding, alone.

Except for a tiny elite, Americans are struggling. But the political class, Dem & Republican, has developed crooked ways of virtue signaling about immigration, using these safe words: Humanitarian crisis! The Kids are in cages. Trafficking. Cartels. Sex.

See:

Do We Still Have A Country? Part I
“We Aren’t Americans; We ARE The World (Part II)”

UPDATE:

The GOP is RIP to me: Typically, Sen. John Kennedy, with his contrived Southern act (he’s Ivy League) and rehearsed, overwrought cracks, puts Trump’s party back decades, tells “Fox News Primetime” host Trey Gowdy that Americans love 1 million legal immigrants coming in annually, object ONLY to illegal, Biden-created chaos on border. (3/9/021)

* Image attribution