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crime and punishment ideological culture media and media people

Police Supremacy

police brutality race

The homicidal beating of Tyre Nichols by five cops made the news, the reels and the opinion columns, quickly and “bigly.” You know that the first reaction was to cry Racism!, and that then, after it came out that the policemen charged with his murder were all black . . . it was still Racism! 

You might have laughed. If bitterly.

Van Jones’s headline seems, on the face of it, ridiculous: “The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism” (January 27, 2023).

Yet, the actual arguments aren’t completely absurd.

Just the big picture is.

Today, we’ve been given a new set of definitions. Racism is no longer prejudiced discrimination against individuals based on antipathy against a hated group, now it’s “prejudice plus power,” and . . . somehow the new anti-racists don’t realize that power isn’t just about race.

It wasn’t likely internalized hatred for blacks that these black policemen exhibited. Far more likely it was exasperation and contempt for a man who wouldn’t submit to their control.

Police have a job, and are given a lot of license and leeway to take away our liberty after a suspected crime. Tyre Nichols did not readily submit to an arrest for reckless driving, but bolted, running away. When the cops caught up with him, they gave him a beating. Was it because he was black? Not likely, or at least not primarily. It was most likely because he wouldn’t obey.

This old police attitude is more understandable than racism, no?

But “understandable” isn’t excuse. 

We can meaningfully talk about reforms — such as getting rid of qualified immunity — but first, let’s stop calling it racism and “white supremacy.” The issue is cop supremacy, and it’s not really a mystery.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

C.S. Peirce

Of the fifty or hundred systems of philosophy that have been advanced at different times of the world’s history, perhaps the larger number have been, not so much results of historical evolution, as happy thoughts which have accidentally occurred to their authors.

Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” in The Monist Vol. I, No. 2 (January 1891), p. 161. Reprinted in many collections, including Justus Buchler, editor, The Philosophy of Charles Peirce (1940).
Categories
Today

Groundhog!

On February 2, 1887, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, celebrated the first Groundhog Day. On the same day in 1976, the Groundhog Day gale hit the north-eastern United States and south-eastern Canada.

In 2009, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe officially devalued the Zimbabwean dollar for the third and final time, making Z$1 trillion now only Z$1 of the new currency, equivalent to Z$10 septillion before the first devaluation. Politicians in Zimbabwe looked up, saw their shadow, and realized that they had only a couple months more of their inflation binge. Indeed, the legalization of trading currencies, the previous month, had sealed the fate of Zimbabwe’s independent dollar. The Zimbabwean dollar was abandoned officially on the 9th of April, 2009.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

Detonators in Place

rent control, good intentions, government regulations

You must place explosives a certain way when demolishing a building to avoid damaging surrounding structures. But if you just want to destroy, you can forget about such precautions.

Could this be the perspective of those demanding national rent control?

They forget — or ignore — the destruction of living space inflicted by incentive-incinerating rent controls in places like New York City and Santa Monica.

Rick Moran perceives that President Biden is making a “first move toward a radical national rent control law,” telling agencies to find ways to stop rent increases. Biden is doing so at the behest of 50 congressional communists who have implored him to take executive action to save tenants from rising rents.

According to their letter, “rent is too high and millions of people across this country are struggling to stay stably housed as a result.” Meanwhile, landlords are “increasing the rent for their own profit . . .”

Profit? In a market economy? 

Rising rents! Caused by . . . ?

But if you just want to “solve the problem” and have been trained to be heedless of the destruction regulation can cause, you needn’t think about cause and effect — who did what and how and why. In the interventionist mentality, when oil or food or housing prices zoom upwards, only one cause is possible, and it has nothing to do with politics and policies already in place.

Even if the government’s central banks have been zanily pumping up the supply of money and credit while city and state bureaus have been going all-out to hamper and halt production.

That single cause, they contend, can only be the grasping, grabbing, profit-seeking capitalists. You know. The bums who make their riches (when they do) by supplying us with what we need.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Iris Murdoch

We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.

Iris Murdoch, concluding sentence to Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953).
Categories
Today

Slavery Abolished

On February 1, 1835, slavery was abolished in Mauritius. Twenty-six years later, in the American Civil War, Texas seceded from the United States. On this date in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed a Joint Resolution from Congress formally submitting the proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to the states for ratification.

This Amendment abolished chattel slavery throughout the union.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture international affairs

Brilliant Billionaire Buffoon

Bill Gates, China, authoritarianism, Covid, human rights

“[China’s] portion of the global economy and their portion of the global population match exactly,” Bill Gates informed his audience at Australia’s Lowy Institute. “Countries like Australia, U.S., we have per capita GDPs five times what the Chinese have, so we have a disproportionate share of the world’s economy.”

Funny that no one made a citizen’s arrest of the world’s fourth richest man, who, when it comes to personal wealth, is disproportionately disproportionate. But maybe the crowd has the respect for what people produce and earn that Mr. Gates appears to lack.

Gates main point was that China’s rise has been “great for the world.” 

While I’m not rooting for the Chinese people to be impoverished, I note that Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, Taiwanese and dissident Chinese aren’t exactly singing the Chinazis’ praises.

. . . except when Uyghurs are forced to sing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda songs in those re-education camps.

Australians are also well aware of China’s ugly behavior, having suffered under punishing economic sanctions ever since the Australian government suggested an international investigation into COVID’s origin and the CCP’s cover-up.

“Gates also leveled criticism at China,” explained Fortune: the billionaire “philanthropist” 

  • admitted that China is “not a democracy,” 
  • rebuked the country for not getting people vaccinated faster and 
  • referred to it as an “outlier today in terms of that level of wealth and still being as autocratic as they are.” 

Actually, “autocratic” is the nicest term available for such a regime. 

Bill Gates is a brilliant businessman, a billionaire many times over, but a complete buffoon (at best*) for failing to even mention the crimes against humanity being committed by the CCP government. 

When he thinks about world governance, now we know what he doesn’t think about.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Evil” is another explanation I’ve heard, but I’m not making that case here.

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Thought

C.S. Peirce

It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction . . . in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.

Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to make our ideas clear,” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878).
Categories
Today

Corn Law

On January 31, 1849, the Corn Laws were abolished in the United Kingdom, one of the most impressive and far-reaching anti-protectionist moves of all time. “Corn” stood for all grains, including wheat, oats, barley, etc.; the free-trade agitation by John Bright and Richard Cobden was one of the main impetuses for the reform.

On Jan. 31, 1865, the United States Congress proposed the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, submitting it to the states for ratification. The Amendment’s main section reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

On Jan. 31, 1990, the first McDonald’s fast food restaurant opened in the Soviet Union. In 2022 they were all closed in protest of the Ukraine war.

Categories
folly ideological culture media and media people

Mr. Vehement

global warming, hysteria, religion

He’s vehement — vehement with the force of 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding each and every day. 

Because he cares. 

He really does. 

He really cares about putting the days of Wooden Al Gore behind him and ushering in Apoplectic Foaming-at-the-Mouth-While-Bleeding-From-Every-Pore Al Gore.

It’s just unfortunate though that whilst ratiocinating at Davos, Mr. Gore destroyed the atmosphere and disarranged the solar system, further accelerating global warming and cooling.

If you’re wondering whether I am now just making stuff up, thank you for noticing; yes: I learned it from the best. But I’m sincere. Okay? I’m emoting very hard right now, for which I fully expect to receive social-credit points that I can tape to my COVID-19 passport and wave at the grocery-store clerk as I pay a thousand dollars for a half-dozen eggs.

If only vehemence were facts and cogency, Al Gore would be the most empirical, most logical man alive. As it is, a billion flabbergasted refugees have fled before the force of his rhetoric.

If you don’t believe that Gore not whispered but roared, nay, expectorated, the following, etc., at Davos about how the (man-made) greenhouse effect is trapping “as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth!! That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and . . . and . . . and —”

. . . then I refer you to the videotape. Roll it, Hal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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