Tag: Seattle

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment ideological culture

After Anarchy, Sue!

Seattle, BLM, protests

In 2020, in Seattle, Washington, “anarchists” took over a section of the Capitol Hill district and set up their own ersatz government, first called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) and then, confusingly, Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). At the crime scene, which went on for weeks during what Seattle’s mayor called “The Summer of Love,” the anarchistic element was always a bit hard to figure, but the Black Lives Matter (BLM) presence stuck in memory. 

Now it’s routinely considered a BLM event.

What it accomplished was a lot of violence and property loss. So Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream, a shop in the center of the 10-​block CHAZ/​CHOP territory, is suing.

Not Black Lives Matter.

Which the owner, Molly Moon Neitzel, takes pains to say she still supports: “At Molly Moon’s we hold race equity at the top of our list of our priorities for how we want to make the world better. Black Lives Matter. The lawsuit filed on Wednesday, June 7 is not meant to undermine that important message,” Ms. Neitzel explained. 

She’s also not suing the individuals who organized and engaged in the insurrection/​conquest, especially the 30 or so “protesters” eventually arrested.

The target? The City of Seattle.

Molly Moon demands compensation for revenue losses, of course, and the “team morale impacts we experienced during and for many months after CHOP caused by the City of Seattle’s decision to affirmatively create and assist the CHOP occupation of Capitol Hill, to abandon the police precinct and to stop responding to public safety needs in our beloved Capitol Hill community.”

In short: Blame the government for not protecting you from the criminals you support!

One might laugh were it not for all the violence that this very attitude excuses.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and DALL-E2

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment

Amazon Retreats from Anarchy

CHAZ, Seattle, crime, progressivism

It turns out that hating on big business while shedding crocodile tears for street criminals and the homeless can have negative consequences.

Seattle, Washington, which in recent years has become increasingly “progressive” with job-​killing minimum wage rate hikes, openly socialist city council members, and a whole mess of bizarre pro-​crime policies, is of course driving businesses (along with decent citizens) out of the city limits.

Amazon, the giant, uber-​successful Internet business announced, last week, that it will “relocate office staff in downtown Seattle due to a sustained uptick in violent crime,” wrote Thomas Kika for Newsweek. And “other businesses in the area” are continuing coronavirus lockdown policies by sticking “with remote work for the same reason.”

Government’s first job is law and order. There’s a case to be made that all other state tasks are decidedly optional, and those other jobs that muck up the first job should be chopped.

Progressives don’t get that.

But speaking of “chopped” — remember CHOP and CHAZ? These were the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest and Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone insurrections of the city’s infamous 2020 “summer of love,” where for weeks on end “protesters” took over the streets and kept out the police and generally behaved like anarchist revolutionaries. It was all very disorderly, yet city officials apologized to-​and-​for the movement for the longest time — presumably because the “protesters” sounded so righteous in standard leftist manner: apparently lacking any arguments against this kind of thing. 

The occupied, autonomous, dangerous inanity was finally stopped, but the rise in vagrancy and crime continues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture

Needed Theft

Seattle, Capitol Hill, crime, law, theft

Some Seattle city council members want to legalize theft when the thief is thereby meeting an “immediate basic need.”

A KOMO News reporter elaborates: “If someone … steals power tools with the intent of reselling them online in order to pay for a basic need like food or rent, the city of Seattle may be OK with that.”

This “principle” discards the principle that individuals have rights, including property rights, which it is wrong to violate by, for example, stealing. With the principle discarded, no line can be drawn to limit the amount of stealing one may do or the means of doing so. The needs of the person being robbed are somehow deemed irrelevant.

The Seattle plan might have spared Hugo’s Jean Valjean decades of being pursued by Javert. But the injustice there wasn’t that Valjean was punished for stealing a loaf of bread but that his punishment — 19 years as a galley slave — was so disproportionate.

Food is a continuing cost. Rent is. The immediacy keeps recurring. What if you have a $2,500 monthly rent?

Well, just gotta steal lots of power tools, and do so regularly. According to the babblers on the Seattle city council, “need” trumps the rights and lives of the innocent. So it’s okay to terrify somebody in a dark alley and grab their stuff even if the victim has an immediate basic need to be left alone.

Seattle has an immediate basic need for a new government that respects lives and property. Until then, let’s hope the “city limit” signs are well marked.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

A Modest Anti-Capitalism?

Sawant, Seattle, socialism,

Socialists are so “modest”!

But how modest?

Ask Rep. Ilhan Omar, who recently proclaimed to be “fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment, in the air we breathe.” 

Gasp?

Well, maybe that isn’t so clear. So listen to Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant.

“I have a message for Jeff Bezos and his class,” Sawant warned. “If you attempt again to overturn the Amazon Tax, working people will go all out in the thousands to beat you. And we will not stop there.”

Does that sound like a threat? Or is it really just a harmless expression of politics-as-usual?

“You see, we are fighting for far more than this tax,” the self-​proclaimed socialist elaborated. “We are preparing the ground for a different kind of society, and if you, Jeff Bezos, want to drive that process forward by lashing out against us in our modest demands, then so be it. Because we are coming for you and your rotten system. We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism. This police state. We cannot and will not stop until we overthrow it, and replace it with a world based, instead, on solidarity, genuine democracy, and equality: a socialist world. Thank you.”

And thank you, Ms. Sawant, for making yourself ultra-understandable.

You want to destroy private property and free markets and robust political debate and replace them with … well, let’s just say that if you complain about a police state now, wait’ll you get a load of what follows from your “modest” demands.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment Popular

Less Hate

hate crime, Seattle, statistics, propaganda,

Just how awful are Americans? Racist and sexist “hate crimes” are all said to have ramped up since the election of Donald Trump.

Wilfred Reilly took a close look, in Quillette, at the hate crime cases in Seattle, which had been reported as having increased “by 400 percent since 2012.” What he discovered throws cold water on the heated assertions. It turns out that “most of the situations contained in the 500-​plus documented incidents for 2018 turned out not to be hate crimes at all.”

As you might expect, defining “hate crime” isn’t easy, and Seattle has “remarkably broad municipal hate-​crime policies” which go far beyond “attacks motivated by racial or sexual animus.” Crimes relating to issues such as “marital status, political ideology, age and parental status” also count.

But for there to be a “hate crime” there must first be a crime. Looking for the “archetypal Seattle hate incident” in the data, what Wilfred Reilly found was “a mentally ill homeless man yelling slurs at someone.” What this really suggests is that Seattle has a homelessness problem.

Which it does.

Behind the panic? We see mis-​reporting, based on a need for generating clicks, as well as mis-​perceptions, often based on availability bias — where we judge trends by a few ready-​at-​hand examples, not with careful attention to full data sets.

The Quillette article does not discuss a more ominous possibility, where some folks yearn for the worst, the better to hate their political opponents. Though Reilly addresses this sort of hate-​generated “hate crime” panic in his book, Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War, published earlier this year.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

PDF for printing

hate crime, Seattle, statistics, propaganda,

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability folly free trade & free markets ideological culture local leaders moral hazard nannyism property rights too much government

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Is …

Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Seattle, taxes, homeless tax, business

A half a year ago, when trying to make sense of the much-​publicized search for Amazon’s “HQ2” — a second headquarters city, away from Seattle — I concentrated on the subsidies that cities and metro areas were apparently throwing at Amazon.

It all seemed desperate, indecent.

But there was a story behind the story. Amazon has every reason to be looking for an escape route from the Evergreen State’s biggest city. 

The city’s leadership is nuts. 

“Seattle City Council members have finally released draft legislation,” the Seattle Times’ Daniel Beekman wrote last month, “for a new tax on large employers that would raise $75 million next year to address homelessness.”

The council blames the big companies for enticing workers into the city, thereby driving up rental costs and housing prices.

The tax would be on employee hours, would go into effect next year, and “in 2021, it would be replaced by a 0.7 percent payroll tax on the same category of companies,” explains the Seattle Times.

Now, if you tax something you discourage that something. That’s why progressives like sin taxes on sodas and fast foods. To discourage consumption. 

So when progressives seek to tax big producers, they are apparently trying to tax away the housing crunch by driving away big business.

Amazon reacted. It put a halt to an expansion project.

“Jeff Bezos is a bully,” said Kshama Sawant, the confessed socialist, speaking for the council. “I think we are in broad agreement on that.”

If that is her attitude, and that of the council — and the consensus of the city’s denizens — then what Amazon’s Jeff Bezos really is?

A “good businessman.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

PDF for printing

Photo by JD Lasica