Category: crime and punishment

Qualified Backlash

Extreme forms of protest — that is, rioting, looting, and street violence, as well as chanting about killing people, carrying torches, and the like — don’t help the cause of those who engage in it.

You know it; I know it — but is it common knowledge?

So, as a contribution to the common wisdom of Homo (hopefully) sapiens politicus, let us stress the truth, which we can now back up with a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Eric W. Dolan, writing on PsyPost, explains that six experiments involving 3, 399 participants “assessed how different types of protest behaviors influenced support for a variety of progressive and conservative social causes, including the Black Lives Matter movement and the anti-abortion movement. They found that more extreme behaviors — such as the use of inflammatory rhetoric, blocking traffic, and vandalism — consistently resulted in reduced support for social movements.”

While “extreme protest behaviors” garner media attention, they turn away more people than they bring in.

“We found extreme anti-Trump protest actions actually led people to not only dislike the movement and support the cause less, but to be willing to support Trump more,” the researcher who talked to Dolan, said. “It was almost like a backlash.”

Almost?

Protest organizers have to understand that their enemies also know this backlash effect, and have incentives to corrupt peaceful protests by sparking extremism. Infiltrators from governments as well as opposing groups have been known to incite riots or cause destruction simply to discredit protests.

While destruction and mayhem by some do not negate the crying, dying need for criminal justice reform,* the tragedy remains: violence does spoil good will.

And calling in federal troops, as the president threatens, discredits almost everything. What a mess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Much better than the turn to violence? Protest morphing into specific legislative and administrative reform. Ending “qualified immunity” for public officials, mentioned here Friday, and proposed by Representative Justin Amash (L-Mich.), would be a great start.

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Tags backlash, brutality, police, protests, race, riots

crime and punishment ideological culture

Victimhood Conspiracy

When a purported Antifa group tweeted an “alert” on Sunday, instructing “Comrades” to “move into residential areas … the white hoods … and we take what’s ours,” tagging it “#BlacklivesMaters #F**kAmerica,” Twitter closed the account.

Few would object.

That was criminal incitement to riot, and worse.

But when Twitter, Facebook and YouTube remove client content for arguing things about the coronavirus that does not fit with government bodies’ officially approved information, something else is going on.

Last week, President Donald Trump warned of the dangers to election integrity of switching to mail-in ballots. So Twitter flagged his tweet, implying it as non-factual.*

I am not going to defend the wisdom or legality of Trump’s threats — on Twitter or by executive order. But one characterization of the whole affair by Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason seems a . . . bit . . . off.

“The order relies heavily on conservatives’ victimhood conspiracy du jour: that social media companies are colluding to suppress conservative voices,” Ms. Brown wrote last Thursday. “It’s an objectively untrue viewpoint, as countless booted and suspended liberal, libertarian, and apolitical accounts can tell you.”

The fact that non-conservatives have been de-platformed does not actually work against the supposition that the social media outfits are colluding against conservatives. It remains a problem if conservative thought is suppressed along with libertarian and anything else heterodox. These companies do conspire to suppress opinions they do not like, and influencers they regard as dangerous.

To center-left establishment opinion.

These social media behemoths aim to defend their approved news and opinion against what they regard as “fake news.” Thereby suppressing free debate and inquiry.

Opposing Trump’s reaction does not require pretending that these companies’ policies are not deeply problematic.

Concern about open and robust debate is not a mere “victimhood conspiracy du jour.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* How a prediction can be a factual matter is a bit odd. But let that slide, I guess.

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Photo by cantfightthetendies

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Accountability crime and punishment

Minneapolis Burning

Minneapolis is up in smoke, after protests became rioting became looting became conflagrations became nightmare. At issue is the police killing of civilian George Floyd.

It was the biggest story in the news, this week, and you can see why. Watch the video of a white policeman with his knee on the neck of a black man, Mr. Floyd, as he pled for his life — as bystanders pled for his life.

It is harrowing.

Scott Adams notes that this became a race issue . . . in which everybody agrees that the police were in the wrong. The best kind of race issue?

Except it shouldn’t be merely a race issue. It should also be an issue of accountability. There are too many killings by police where the perpetrators face zero accountability.

Jay Schweikert, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice, advocates a direct, practical approach for restoring police accountability: End what is known as “qualified immunity.”

That’s where police and other public officials are held to a lesser legal standard when it comes to court cases charging them with violating our rights. This is the reason, argues Schweikert, that “members of law enforcement routinely get away with horrific misconduct.”

There are several petitions currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court that could lead to a legal reconsideration of the idea.* But without regard to any legal judgement, lawmakers in legislatures and citizens by petition can expressly repeal qualified immunity.

And should.

Without police accountability, what freedom is there?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “[Q]ualified immunity is a legal doctrine that was invented from whole cloth by the Supreme Court,” Schweikert explains, “in open defiance of Congress’s decision to provide people with a federal remedy for the ‘deprivation of any right[]’ at the hands of a state actor.”

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Photograph by mpeake

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crime and punishment general freedom too much government

Pocket Prohibition?

vape, backpack, authoritarianism, surveillance,

Should the FDA outlaw backpack pockets?

Trick question.

Oh, you said “no”?

Okay, not that tricky . . .

But a little tricky. The FDA doesn’t want to prohibit backpack pockets as such. Only backpack pockets that can hide vaping equipment, like an e-cigarette.

Such pockets could presumably also hold a pen, thermometer, stick of beef jerky, perhaps even a plastic straw or spindled dollar bill. The list of cacheable contraband is endless. But it’s the thoughtcrime that counts.

The FDA wants to deploy its power to regulate food and drugs to also bully makers of pockets and other things that facilitate peaceful actions of which FDA officials disapprove. For now the agency is sending stern letters to sellers of legal products.

Tomorrow it may send SWAT teams.

“The FDA is especially disturbed by some of these new products being marketed to children and teens by promoting the ease with which they can be used to conceal product use,” frets Mitch Zeller, king of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. (It’s not an emporium.)

Various products that could help a person vape furtively are on the FDA’s hit list. Many of these products never hurt a fly. Backpack pockets in particular are getting a bad rap. I’m a fan of backpack pockets and hope the production of every kind of backpack pocket will continue unabated.

So, regardless of any animus that certain functionaries may feel about the covert carrying of e-cigarettes, pencils, or swizzle sticks, let them leave backpack pockets alone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom too much government

The Wisdom of Freedom

“Salon À la Mode owner Shelley Luther was sentenced to seven days in jail for criminal and civil contempt and a $7,000 fine,” the Dallas-Ft. Worth CBS affiliate reported Tuesday, “for defying Governor Greg Abbott’s stay-at-home rules.”

She dared to open her beauty salon . . . and tore up a county judge’s related and official-looking cease and desist order.

Another judge offered to spare her jail if she would confess that her “actions were selfish” and, the judge lectured, “putting your own interest ahead of those in the community in which you live.” Luther responded decisively: “Feeding my kids isn’t selfish.”

Calling for Luther’s “immediate release,” Attorney General Ken Paxton articulated smart policy: “The judge should not put people in jail like her who are just trying to make a living.”

That should be written in law — sans the “like her” part.

The agile Governor Abbott, the rule’s originator, ducked responsibility with “surely there are less restrictive means to achieving [public safety] than jailing a Texas mother.”

Then, governor, why the command?

“I am modifying my executive orders,” Abbott declared yesterday, “to ensure confinement is not a punishment for violating an order.”

The Lieutenant Governor paid her fine.

Shelley Luther was “free” — and on Fox News last night.

But have we learned anything?

Why not provide the public with the best information available and allow people to make their own decisions? No orders. Businesspeople would be free to do what they think is best. At-risk folks would be free to be very careful.

Obviously, governments can help. But best through persuasion, remembering they work for us.

Free people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: In The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), James Surowiecki posited that “a diverse collection of independently deciding individuals” can make complex decisions better than the experts. Exactly.

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crime and punishment general freedom

Action Ensued

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio seemed proud of his new initiative. To fight coronavirus, he thinks — and he is joined by a whole lot of other people — that everyone should stay at home indoors. And wear masks, gloves, etc., when going out for essentials only.

But since not everyone will cooperate, what to do? Apply social pressure, such as eye-rolls and a few tsk-tsks?

Well, not this Big Apple mayor.

Better get the police power involved!

De Blasio’s notion has been called a “snitch hotline.” In the spirit of “see-something/say-something,” he asked New Yorkers to snap photos of the scofflaws:

Text the photo to 311-692
and action will ensue.

And boy, did he get responses!

Immediately.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail explains that “the service was inundated with prank calls, pictures of genitalia and memes likening de Blasio to Adolf Hitler.”

My favorite “meme” sports a photo of the Führer captioned “TO THOSE TURNING IN THEIR NEIGHBORS AND LOCAL BUSINESSES / YOU DID THE REICH THING.”

And while Stalin analogies might be more apt for the quasi-commie mayor, Hitler references sting more.

John Nolte at Breitbart, referencing George Orwell’s 1984, called the responses “glorious” and “freakin’ awesome.”

The city closed down the hotline for a while to set up a filtering service before sending out leads to the police departments.

In New York City, as in most places in America, if you attempt to establish a Big Brotherish snitch-line, you will get a free-wheeling re-action.

Is this a great country or what?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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