Tag: society

Instapundit rightly slaps down a reader who wants to give carte blanche to cops:

If there is one thing about your political views that drives me nuts, it’s your seeming animosity towards law enforcement. I understand that much of what you highlight are honest to God abuses of power, some of a very serious nature. (Some are just bad mistakes.) But I think you ignore one salient fact – cops basically deal with dangerous assholes. You and I don’t, typically, deal with such people on a regular basis, so we have to be careful how we judge policemen. Maybe the officer was wrong to mention rape, but how many self-righteous (and guilty) jerks whip out their cell phones and start giving cops shit? A lot, I’ll bet. They can’t afford to take a kumbaya approach to dealing with people, you know? Perhaps you should cut them some slack.

Well, I’m happy to cut people slack in cases of, say, mistaken self-defense where it’s an honest mistake. But the things I flag are abuses of power, pure and simple. We don’t have titles of nobility in this country, and when you have a badge and a gun you should behave better than the average schmuck, rather than having a license to be a jerk. I’m always surprised that people find this controversial.

The reader is absolutely wrong. Police should be given absolutely NO slack whatsoever. If they are going to enforce the law effectively, then they must be more law-abiding than the average citizen. Instead, they are little more than a licensed gang of armed criminals whose lawless behavior is overlooked because it is in the interest of the state. Fortunately, there are some law enforcement officers who are capable of rising above their bureaucratic profession, but it is not hard to observe that most police have more in common with the “dangerous assholes” of the criminal minority than they do with the non-criminal majority of the population.

The fact that police forces tend to be made up of corrupt and undisciplined individuals has been seen throughout history. Soldiers are seldom considered to be society’s elite, but even inexperienced second-line military units make police units look like a collection of gutter riff-raff in comparison. In strategy games like ASL, for example, police units are usually represented by conscripts, which tells you all that you need to know about their professionalism, effectiveness, and morale.

I don’t know if bad men are drawn to the job or the strains of the job makes good men bad. But regardless, the ethic of “badge makes right” is a legal, moral, and ethical non-starter.

It begins as France starts the expulsions:

France expelled nearly 100 Gypsies, or Roma, to their native Romania on Thursday as part of a very public effort by conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy to dismantle Roma camps and sweep them out of the country, the Immigration Ministry said.

This is why I have never bought into the notion that the European nations are going to disappear due to their demographic issues. They are reacting much more strongly to a much lower percentage of the population than Americans have with Hispanics because they have no “melting pot” mythology. Notice that with the economic contraction, the assumption that Turkey would join the EU has faded away. Demographics are destiny, but they do not always proceed in a clean and linear fashion.

The Dark Lord of the Crimson Arts points out what should now be obvious to everyone who is paying attention:

As it is, our society is at a fork in the road. We can go one of two ways if an end to the divorce industrial complex is your goal:

1. Rescind feminism.

Basically, turn back the clock on the so-called “improvements” in divorce litigation. Put divorce lawyers out of business. Custody of children would be split evenly, half the time with mom and half the time with dad, unless solid evidence of extenuating fault could be found, such as pedophilia or physical abuse. End all affirmative action and favoritism, explicit or implicit, for women. This means no more maternal leave or sexual harassment workshops. Return shame to its rightful place as a molder of human behavior.

2. Follow feminism to its logical conclusion.

Completely gut the traditional notion of marriage by legally establishing polygamy and assorted polyamorous relationships as equally valid unions. (Should be easier now that there is legal justification for gay marriage.) Make divorce as easy as buying a gallon of milk. Reform marriage so that it better reflects the evolutionary disposition of people to fall out of love after seven years (or approximately the time the kids are old enough to function without constant parental supervision.) If we are biologically designed by evolution to weary of our partners after seven to ten years, then why is marriage not arranged in such a way that acknowledges this reality?

Obviously, our suffragized society has chosen the latter goal. How’s that working out for everyone? Bankrupt, divorced and stupid is no way to sustain a civilization.

When did it become a federal law that you must sell houses to black people?

In this tough real estate market, you would think that agents would be itching to sell their properties to anyone with money in hand. But a Chicago couple, their agent, and their broker are accused of some nasty discrimination that goes beyond being overly particular. Daniel and Adrienne Sabbia have been charged with refusing to sell a Bridgeport home to a Black couple because of their race, reports Chicago Breaking News.

Just in case you weren’t entirely sure that the civil rights movement killed the U.S. Constitution and the right of free association it contained, this prosecution should serve as sufficient evidence. In a free society, it’s not your business, my business, or the government’s business why someone chooses to sell or not sell anything to anyone. I’d like to see HUD go whole hog on this and declare that in the interest of expanding black homeownership, all purchase offers made by black individuals must be accepted at any price. Whether the home is listed for sale or not. Now that the principle of the free market in housing has been abandoned, there’s no reason not to set the parameters wherever the HUD bureaucrats happen to think best at the moment.

Ross Douthat writes a pretty good column in the New York Times explaining how the anti-homogamy side has made a mistake relying upon irrelevant arguments. He also reiterates the one they should have been making from the start:

The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

Again, this is not how many cultures approach marriage. It’s a particularly Western understanding, derived from Jewish and Christian beliefs about the order of creation, and supplemented by later ideas about romantic love, the rights of children, and the equality of the sexes. Or at least, it was the Western understanding. Lately, it has come to co-exist with a less idealistic, more accommodating approach, defined by no-fault divorce, frequent out-of-wedlock births, and serial monogamy.

Douthat also inadvertantly mentions the source of the problem, as the supplementation of those later ideas, especially the fictional “equality” of the sexes has been far more destructive to Western civilization than homogamy will if the judicial activists are successful in imposing their antidemocratic will upon the people. In fact, I tend to see homogamy and its assorted ills as being much more a late-stage symptom than a causal factor when it comes to societal collapse.

But that doesn’t change the easily observable fact that the forces pushing homogamy and open homosexuality are actively engaged in attempting to destroy one of the more successful civilizations in human history. As I showed in yesterday’s WND column, there is no genuine “progress” being made here, social or moral, this is simply a return to the pagan decadence of a society that was in decline 18 centuries ago. The observations of one of the first historians of women, Alfred Brittain, made at the turn of the 20th century about Roman women, was an insightful harbinger of the subsequent success of the suffrage movement.

“Julia represented the prevalent social conditions of her time. Licentiousness, like a cancer, was eating into the heart of Roman society; and this was to grow still worse. It must be admitted also that female degeneracy kept pace with the increase of woman’s influence in the political world. Livia and Agrippina the Elder were exceptions; but the rule was, and has been in all history, that the activity of women in State affairs was accompanied by an abundance of meretricious amatory intrigues. It is a remarkable fact that in the history of the Roman woman–and possibly this statement might be given a much wider application–there is no instance where any individual woman designedly helped to bring about the enactment of a law for the public weal. Female politics always had for their object the advancement of the female politician’s own personal interests or those of some male favorite.”

To be fair, there have been the occasional exceptions over the last 100 years, such as Margaret Thatcher, but then of course she was declared to be “not of the gender woman” by fellow members of her sex for her sin of deviating from the female political pattern.* What is ironic is that so many individuals who greatly cherish certain fruits of Western civilization, such as the science fetishists to give one example, completely fail to recognize that the societal decline they are lauding as “social progress” is much more likely to destroy the aspects of Western civilization that they enjoy, such as wealth, technology, science, free speech and relative political freedom, than it is to eliminate the moral and cultural aspects that they despise. To repeat my comment from yesterday, ignorant pagans rutting in filth and poverty are not capable of funding either the development of new technologies or the expansion of the scientific knowledge base. There are no science labs in grass huts.

*This was a direct quote from a female professor at my university.

At least, at the Southern Poverty Law Center. They’re certainly not poor and they don’t look all that Southern either.

Sasquatch writes: I sincerely hope you can write a blog entry about this. I can’t properly put into words how much rage I feel for those who’ve tried to destroy this man’s life. He was falsely accused of molesting a neighbor’s child and he’s put together the entire journey in detailed fashion. It touches on so many of the issues you write about – abuses of the Department of Social Services, misuse of police powers, herd mentality, churchianity, and the pressure on a traditional nuclear family.

In November of 2006, I was accused by a family whom we considered our friends, of inappropriately touching their 4 year old daughter during a party out my home.  The accusation was ridiculous, as in our house at the time were more than 15 adults.  Regardless, I was arrested, placed in jail, released, lost my job, removed from my home for a year, lost all but our closest of friends, and shunned by our neighbors.  For the first time in all of my years of living in the US, I have a criminal record.  What makes all of this so shocking is I did nothing.  There was no evidence beyond the word of a 4-year old girl.

Follow the money and notice that the “victim’s” family actually made a couple of thousand dollars off the accusing process. And note that it is ALWAYS a mistake to speak to the police in America without a lawyer present. Be pleasant and be polite, but do not ever offer information or cooperate in any way, shape or form. They will take even the smallest shred of barely relevant information and use it to spin a fictional narrative; their job is to find a perpetrator and feed him into the machine, not to divine the truth. Unless you wish to become a part of that narrative, you must keep your mouth shut. Furthermore, keep in mind that their assurances to you are worthless; courts have repeatedly confirmed that the police are permitted to lie to witnesses and suspected perpetrators alike.

Now, perhaps I’ve been living in Italy too long, but it seems to me that the man would likely have been better off spending the thirty thousand on MS-13 instead of lawyers and court fees if he wanted to get the charges dropped. These miscarriages of justice are exactly why people have historically turned to godfathers and gangleaders instead of being willing to let the machinery of the system run its course.

Of course, the primary lesson is to absolutely refuse all physical contact with children who are not your own. I’m not the touchy-feely type, so this is not at all a problem for me, but men of an avuncular inclination should take note. If you never touch other children, much less permit them to sit on your lap, your denials of any potential false accusation will be all the more credible.

Don’t rely on the cops:

The District police department policy on forcible entry caused a “deadly delay” as officers waited for a supervisor outside an apartment while a mother and her two young sons were being stabbed to death inside, according to a lawsuit filed by the woman’s family. The policy that led to police taking nearly an hour to finally bust down the door and find the murdered family is at the center of a $60 million wrongful death lawsuit against the city and the officers involved.

As has happened in every other case of this type, the police will be found to have no liability because it has been well-established in various courts of law that they have absolutely no responsibility for defending you. If you are relying on the police instead of yourself, you are quite literally defenseless. If you don’t own a shotgun, a rifle, and a pistol or three, then you are neglecting one of your most basic responsibilities as a human being.

This is absolutely hilarious:

We all went to bed that night, and then at 1:15 AM, my doorbell rang. Our dog started barking and we heard bam, bam, bam … someone was banging on our door. It was the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. An officer said an anonymous tip had come in that our daughter was hurting herself. He wouldn’t tell us who called the tip in, but he made me wake my daughter up to make sure she was OK. The officer was really rude and my daughter kept denying that she made any videos. She kept saying, “I didn’t do any of this!” He was here for about 15 minutes.

The next morning, my husband and I were sitting in our home when the doorbell rang again. Another sheriff’s department officer was banging on the door. This time, they had another anonymous tip from someone in California claiming my daughter had female prostitutes coming in and out of our home from ads posted on Craigslist.

The punchline? All sorts of idiots on both sides of the political spectrum think that the problem here is Internet trolls and the solution is even MORE police activity. Of course, the only reason that anyone can be harassed this way is because of the police state in which the police do everything from sending investigative officers to armed SWAT teams to people’s houses without warrants on the sole basis of anonymous tips.

What’s happening here does reflect a sick society, but 4chan is not the sickness. It is merely a symptom of the myriad of ways in which the mere existence of the police state creates harassment of the individual.