Race Demagogues Vs. The Misrule of Law

BAB's A List, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Race, Racism, The State

By Myron Pauli

In 2006, 50 bullets were fired at 3 unarmed drunk black men leaving a strip club in Queens – killing one, maiming 2, and almost wounding a bystander and two nearby Port Authority patrolmen. America’s number one race baiter, Al Sharpton, started to growl until it was discovered that the first cop to fire, Gescard Isnora, was black – oh, well… never mind!

Yes, blacks kill blacks, blacks kill whites, whites kill whites, and (surprise) whites sometimes even kill blacks. But only the last of these phenomena is an excuse for the Sharptons to rouse up crowds and, if the opportunity arises, looters to rob and burn every store in town. By the way, the Queens cops were exonerated of all charges (yawn)!

One issue that arises is whether certain laws have “disparate impact”? Yes, rape laws affect men more than women. Prostitution laws affect women more than men. Burglary laws affect poor more than rich. Brokerage fraud laws probably affect Jews more than Buddhists. If improperly wearing a hearing aid was criminalized, it would probably affect the elderly more than the young. I do not see “disparate impact” as a reason to invalidate a law that is otherwise proper.

Nevertheless, while the Torah has 365 prohibitions – some “secular” such as dishonest weights, stealing, and murder; and some “religious” such as not eating pork—in Bloombergian America, we need tens of thousands of laws to regulate all of us sinful citizens – the Torah is almost anarchistic. And to enforce Bloombergia, we need lots of cops armed with the latest from the Department of Defense with SWAT “no knock” raids, “stop and frisk”, zero tolerance, TSA gropes, Tasers, ….

The other piece of the puzzle, of course, is the higher rate of criminality by black men. The recent “Hollaback” video – which has some feminists calling for laws against talking to women on city streets – shows mostly black men coming up to the white girl walking. Even Jesse Jackson has admitted that he would be more likely to clutch his groceries more tightly or cross the street at night if walking alone and seeing Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown than 3 elderly Asian women. Now, perhaps, elderly Asian women should start committing more crime to make things “fair” but this might not improve the world.

So imagine 10,000 business regulations in Bloombergville – which companies are more likely to “comply” – Con Ed and Verizon or Pedro’s Bodega and Mobutu’s Taxi? Personally, I am happy with the law that says “don’t defraud your customers” but perhaps the other 9999 laws can be scrapped because they are idiotic onerous laws, not because they are part of a “racist conspiracy” again Pedro and Mobutu.

And so it is, often in “liberal” minority communities, that one finds the most idiotic and corrupt governments, onerous petty rules, highest taxes, idiotic traffic traps, and (sadly) the worst cops. The Cleveland cop who shot the 12 year old boy had been dismissed from his job in suburban Independence. My revulsion over race-baiters and looters does not mean I need to admire corrupt governments and pathological policing.

The case of Eric Garner is illustrative. Garner was making a few bucks avoiding the 300% cigarette tax and the cops came to bust him. However, they did not bother to ask him a few times (time was not urgent) to put out his hands for arrest but all of a sudden pounced on him, riding him like Secretariat and tackling him to the ground to handcuff him. He said a couple times that he couldn’t breathe. Then, he lay in front of the cops for 7 minutes. The NYPD is trained in CPR – “Curtesy, Professionalism, and Respect” AND Cardin-Pulmonary-Resuscitation – but practiced neither. WAS IT “CRIMINAL”?? – I personally did not hear from the dozen witnesses nor gone frame-by-frame over the Garner – Cop – Jujitsu part nor know the “mens rea” requirements pursuant to an arrest to determine involuntary manslaughter vs. reckless endangerment vs nothing. So far, the ONLY one indicted was the (white) cameraman, Ramsey Orta, on “criminal possession of a weapon” based on an undercover police investigation.

Respect for the law goes down the toilet among civilians of ALL races unless the government holds itself accountable.

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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 Lis

Adding Fire Power To The Literary Canon

English, Human Accomplishment, Literature, The West

With respect to the column “Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon,” my good editor at Quarterly Review rightly griped that I should have added more titles fit for the precocious child reader.

Leslie’s favorites are Shakespeare, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick. Seconded. And boy, did I adore Molière, “one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature.”

Add Don Quixote by Cervantes, Kafka, Albert Camus, Rudyard Kipling. The Hebrew Bible is a very racy, great read. I’m no expert on the New Testament.

UPDATED: Eric Garner: 100% Innocent In Libertarian Law (Note On Natural Law)

Free Markets, Justice, Law, libertarianism, Natural Law, Private Property, Regulation, The State

To the libertarian, the case of Eric Garner is as simple as it is sad. In libertarian law, Eric Garner is innocent as a newborn babe. It all boils down to the distinction between the natural and the positive law. Here again it is useful to contrast the Garner case with the case of Michael Brown (see “Don’t Conflate The Michael Brown And Eric Garner Cases”).

The good libertarian abides by the axiom of non-aggression. Michael Brown, the evidence shows, initiated aggression. He had aggressed against the store keeper and the policeman, who protected himself from this rushing mountain of flesh. In libertarian law, the individual may defends himself against initiated aggression. He does not initiate aggression against a non-aggressor.

Eric Garner, on the other hand, had aggressed against nobody. The “law” he violated was one that violated Garner’s individual, natural right to dispose of his own property (“loosies”) at will. When the enforcers of the shakedown syndicate came around to bust him, Garner raised his voice, gestured and turned to walk away from his harassers. He did not aggress against or hurt anyone of the goons.

“Liberty is a simple thing. It’s the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician [or policeman], unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured, and even killed.” (“Tasers ‘R’ Us.”)

Garner obeyed the libertarian, natural law absolutely. He was trading peacefully and he attempted to walk away from a confrontation peacefully. (More evidence that goes to his character: Prior to his murder, Garner had broken up a street fight.)

The government has a monopoly over making and enforcing law— it decides what is legal and what isn’t. Thus it behooves thinking people to question the monopolist and his laws. After all, cautioned the great Southern constitutional scholar James McClellan, “What is legally just, may not be what is naturally just.” “Statutory man-made law” is not necessarily just law.

Unlike the positive law, which is state-created; natural law in not enacted. Rather, it is a higher law—a system of ethics—knowable through reason, revelation and experience. “By natural law,” propounded McClellan in “Liberty, Order, And Justice,” “we mean those principles which are inherent in man’s nature as a rational, moral, and social being, and which cannot be casually ignored.”

Garner was on “public” property. Had he been trespassing on private property, the proprietor would have been in his right to remove him. However, Garner was not violating anyone’s rights or harming anyone by standing on the street corner and peddling his wares—that is unless the malevolent competition, which sicced the cops on him, has a property right in their prior profits. They don’t.

UPDATE (12/6): Natural law is an ancient philosophy rooted in very real, non-abstract civilizations, going back to ancient Greece, Rome; Ten Commandments, the Scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, Thomists, English common-law, etc. (NOT Rousseau.) It has always been a bulwark against tyranny—that of monarch and mob.

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.

MORE.

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