Tag: society

Ban SWAT

They are totally out of control.  They murder pets, murder innocent people, lie about it after the fact, and usually get away with “accidents” like killing young mothers and maiming babies.  Reason’s Radley Balko has long been in the forefront of the war on the War on Drugs:

On February 11, the Columbia, Missouri, police department’s SWAT team served a drug warrant at the home of Jonathan Whitworth and Brittany Montgomery. Police say that eight days earlier they had received a tip from a confidential informant that Whitworth had a large supply of marijuana in his home. They say they first conducted a trash pull, and found marijuana residue in the family’s garbage. During the raid, police shot and killed the family’s pit bull. At least one bullet ricocheted, injuring the family’s pet corgi. Whitworth, Montgomery, and their 7-year-old son were at home at the time. The incident was written up in the Columbia Daily Tribune, noted on a few blogs that cover drug policy (including a post I put up here at Reason), and then largely forgotten for several weeks.

On April 28, I received an email from Montgomery. She had seen my post at Reason and read an account of some of my reporting on SWAT teams published in Reader’s Digest. She said she was reading to her son in his bedroom at the time of the raid. Her husband had just returned home from work. Police fired on their pets within seconds of entering the home.

“I’ve never felt so violated or more victimized in my life,” Montgomery wrote. “It’s absolutely the most helpless and hopeless feeling I could ever imagine. I can’t sleep right … and I am constantly paranoid. It’s a horrible feeling … to lose the safety and security I thought I was entitled to in my own home. Nobody protected us that night, my son and I were locked in the back of a police car for nearly four hours on a school night while they destroyed my home.”

According to Montgomery, when the couple’s neighbors inquired about the raid, they were told that the SWAT team had merely conducted a drill, and no shots were fired. When neighbors learned from the family that this was a lie, they began writing to the department and the Daily Tribune to demand answers. When the couple discovered the police had videotaped the raid, they requested a copy of the video. Montgomery said in her email that the copy they were initially given had no audio, and the incriminating (to the police) portions of the video had been removed.

On February 23, the Daily Tribune published its first story on the raid. The paper made its own request for the SWAT video, which the police department initially denied. On April 20, Jonathan Whitworth pleaded guilty to a single charge of possession of drug paraphernalia. He wasn’t even charged for the minor amount of marijuana in his home (marijuana for personal use has been decriminalized in Columbia). He was issued a $300 fine. On April 27, the Daily Tribune made a formal request for the video, which it received on April 30, with full audio and with no visuals removed. The paper posted the video with an accompanying article on May 3. On May 5, I posted it here at Reason, and the video went viral.

The police department has since conceded it was unaware that there were pets or a child in the home at the time of the raid. A spokesman for the Columbia Police Department initially said police had to conduct the raid immediately before the drug supply could be moved, a statement later shown to be false when police revealed the raid was conducted more than a week after the initial tip.

Police SWAT teams are provably more dangerous to Americans than the Taliban, al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden combined.  They are far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein and the Republican Guard ever were.  So, it is long past time for states and communities to begin outlawing both SWAT teams and the no-knock raids they commit on a regular basis.

Mailvox: Hollywood Game

Mr BAD had nothing better to do: I’ve decided to discuss movie characters according to the Vox Day Game chart.

Star Wars series
Luke Skywalker: Delta-Gamma. At no point in the films is he ever a leader personality. Even when he is giving orders he does so in more of a whine rather as a command. In Empire and Return of the Jedi, Han sounds surprised that Vader is after Luke, and that Luke is the one who is rescuing him.

Han Solo: Sigma. Han has everything it takes to be a great leader but would rather not have to deal with the problems that come with it. He does as he pleases, doesnt take crap, and no one can forget how Harrison Ford became an instant sex symbol when he returned Leia”s “I love you” with “I know”. He even has a Betta in Chewie following him around.

Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker: Gamma- Alpha. In the films Vader/anakin is a total Gamma. As a young Anakin he is whinny, and self important. I think this is mostly from the actor Hayden, but nevertheless Anakin is a Gamma. He wins over Padme by puppydog eyes and begging. I think if it hadnt been for her witnessing his badboy streak in killing the Sanpeople village, she never would have agreed to mary him. As a Jedi Knight he is still whiny and sefl important, although he has gained confidence, he is still no leader. As Vader he rules with fear rather than respect that comes from real leadership. As a Sith he is still bellow Mof Tarkin in Imperial rank. Only in the Clone Wars cartoon is Anakin portrayed as the dashing war hero described by ObiWon in A New Hope. In the Cartoon Anakin is a confident charismatic Alpha with a dark hidden wrath streak.

Obi Won Kenobi: Beta. Obi Won is confident, strong and capable but takes all his cues from his superiors. I dont know why ObiWon doesnt get more credit as being a powerful Jedi. He killed Darth Mual quickly, and the Jedi Killing Machine Grevious, battles a dark side powered Vader to victory, and held Vader to a stand still in his late 60’s.

Yoda: Alpha. yeah, he never had to convince anybody who was incharge. they just knew when he enetered the room.

Darth Sidious/Palpatine: Alpha. . He was able to lead boh sides against eachother until everything was weak enough for him to sieze total power. As a ruler/leader he does so because people are confident in his ability to lead and his choices.

The Matrix trilogy

Neo. Sigma. Through the whole series he coulnt seem more interested in making other people happy, he just does what he does. He always seems to want to be doing somthing else besides being the Messiah figure.

Mopheous. Alpha. Morpheous is the guy who leads by the power of his prescence and personality.

Agent Smith. Gamma. self important, goes psycho because he cant accept not having his way.

Conan the Barbarian. Alpha.

Rocky. Delta-Gamma. from the beginning to the end of the series Rocky is a loser who refuses to give up.

Fill in the blank Clint Eastwood role. Sigma

Dealing with the police

A cop with the intriguingly titled group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition sent me this video clip today. It’s targeted at blacks, but these days it is relevant for everyone. There’s not necessarily a whole lot new there, but it is still a helpful reminder of the way to deal with those carrying guns and badges in order to reduce the risk of suboptimal outcomes.

I don’t know what the rest of the rules are, but certainly staying calm, cool, and civil is excellent advice.

A woman’s place

Here is an easy way to determine where you should be looking to invest over the next 20 years:

Women head governments, run companies and comprise about half the world’s workforce, but a global poll shows that one in four people, most of them young, believe a woman’s place is in the home. The survey of over 24,000 adults in 23 countries, conducted by Reuters/Ipsos and released on the eve of International Women’s Day, showed that people from India (54 percent), Turkey (52 percent), Japan (48 percent), China, Russia, Hungary (34 percent each) and South Korea (33 percent) were most likely to agree that women should not work. And, perhaps surprisingly, people aged between 18 and 34 years are most likely to hold that view, not those from the older, and more traditional, generation.

The key phrase there being “most of them young”. Why is that? Because their understanding of the costs of women working is based on actual experience of them, whereas for the older generation, those costs are tangential at best. The severing of women from their traditional, and only absolutely vital role, is why secular Western society has turned into one of history’s many dead ends for a civilization. Change is the one constant of history, and it is now demographically certain that liberal democratic secular society will not survive for another fifty years.

The future belongs to those who show up for it. And the plan to preserve secular society by substituting indoctrination for propagation has clearly failed.

Ashes on the dollar

Americans continue to opt out of the financial system:

Hoskins told News 5’s Courtis Fuller that he issued the bank an ultimatum. “I’ll tear it down before I let you take it,” Hoskins told them. And that’s exactly what Hoskins did. The Moscow man used a bulldozer two weeks ago to level the home he’d built, and the sprawling country home is now rubble, buried under a coating of snow.

If your life is being financially destroyed by the bankers and bureaucrats anyhow, there’s really not much reason to avoid repaying them ashes on the dollar. With 10.5% of all homes already delinquent or in default, what are the banks going to do when people simply refuse to leave or pay for them, beg the Feds to put 6.6 million homeowners in jail? And who is going to pay the costs of their imprisonment?

In 2008, the bankers, bureaucrats, and politicians tore the veil of the unwritten American social contract that permitted our debt-based economy to function. While the deck was always stacked to the benefit of the financial elite, it wasn’t always so egregious. But in ramming through TARP and the bailouts over the furious objections of the American people, they shattered the illusion of relative fairness. So now, they have absolutely no response when the American people stop playing a game that is stacked so heavily against them. The parasites came to believe they were invaluable and in doing so forgot the very first rule of parasitism: do not harm the host.

It’s almost surely too late to salvage the present financial system, but it is still worth attempting to restore the broken American social contract. The first step in doing so is to follow the Market Ticker’s advice of arresting, prosecuting and asset-stripping every member of the financial elite that can be proven to have committed criminal fraud over the last decade. The second step is to audit the Federal Reserve and open the books to the public. The third step is to unwind the banking bailouts and tax all of the bailed-out executives and employees 100 percent while making it clear that no such bailouts will ever be permitted to take place again. These measures will be totally unacceptable to the banking class, but the alternative will be much worse for everyone.

The vast majority of Americans are never going to bulldoze their houses. But millions of them – or rather, tens of millions more – are simply going to stop paying their debts and transform themselves from productive members of society into societal parasites. The time for playing economic charades is over, everyone knows that the system is crumbling because they can see the signs of it all around them. Extend and pretend simply isn’t an option anymore and the risks of refusing to deal with reality are only going to continue to grow with time.

Galt-squared

As I wrote earlier today, once people understand that American society not only isn’t even remotely fair or just, but is today primarily structured for the continued benefit of the bankocracy at the expense of the taxpayers, they’re not going to continue playing any longer:

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.

While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!

There is something deeply sick about a society that manages to transform intelligent, successful, productive members of society into felons and murderous suicides. The irony is that the more a man genuinely believes in justice and law, the more he truly believes that America is the Land of the Free, the more shattered he is when he is forced to confront the reality that the entire legal system is a facade designed to conceal the complete absence of justice and rule of law in American society.

A society whose leaders are foolish enough to willfully destroy its structural foundations should not be surprised when madmen increasingly begin to appear in its midst. But the problem is that insane actions such as Stack’s are merely a symptom; what is ultimately much more problematic is all the talented individuals who simply won’t bother to create wealth that is only going to be taken away from them. I suppose it may be possible to maintain a wealthy and stable society that consists of nothing more than government employees and a vast horde of unemployed individuals supporting a small financial elite that generates enormous profits by playing complicated gambling games with itself, but if it is, I have to confess that I understand neither the economics nor the logic that makes it viable.

We can quite reasonably describe Joseph Stack as a madman, categorize his suicidal actions as insanity, and ignore his rantings as the last angry words of an embittered failure. He was, after all, the very antithesis of a hero and his actions were as stupid and evil as they were futile. But I think we should also ask two questions before we forget the episode entirely entirely. Was the man always a lunatic? And if not, what was it that turned him into one?

More thoughts on the matter at the Market Ticker.

The social cost of maleconomy

Don Peck writes an ominous article about the transformation of America in the Atlantic:

By the time the average out-of-wedlock child has reached the age of 5, his or her mother will have had two or three significant relationships with men other than the father, and the child will typically have at least one half sibling. This kind of churning is terrible for children—heightening the risks of mental-health problems, troubles at school, teenage delinquency, and so on—and we’re likely to see more and more of it, the longer this malaise stretches on.

“We could be headed in a direction where, among elites, marriage and family are conventional, but for substantial portions of society, life is more matriarchal,” says Wilcox. The marginalization of working-class men in family life has far-reaching consequences. “Marriage plays an important role in civilizing men. They work harder, longer, more strategically. They spend less time in bars and more time in church, less with friends and more with kin. And they’re happier and healthier.”

Communities with large numbers of unmarried, jobless men take on an unsavory character over time. Edin’s research team spent part of last summer in Northeast and South Philadelphia, conducting in-depth interviews with residents. She says she was struck by what she saw: “These white working-class communities—once strong, vibrant, proud communities, often organized around big industries—they’re just in terrible straits. The social fabric of these places is just shredding. There’s little engagement in religious life, and the old civic organizations that people used to belong to are fading. Drugs have ravaged these communities, along with divorce, alcoholism, violence. I hang around these neighborhoods in South Philadelphia, and I think, ‘This is beginning to look like the black inner-city neighborhoods we’ve been studying for the past 20 years.’

Fortunately, all those millions of relatively impoverished immigrants from third-world cultures are likely to provide a wonderful antidote to this decline into matriarchal barbarism. Since immigration is good for the economy, imagine how bad unemployment might be if it weren’t for 12 million illegal immigrants doing the jobs that unemployed Americans can’t do.

Tucker Max and the fall of the West

Charlotte Allen writes a remarkably clear-eyed article on the evolution of Game and its social significance for American civilization:

[I]t’s a fair signal of impending social chaos when the prevailing female attitude is dissatisfaction, either mild or intense, with the workaday Joes—the good-provider beta males—whom one has already married or, in the era before the sexual and feminist revolutions, would be planning to marry because chasing alphas in bars was not a respectable option for the female middle class.

One would have to be either blind or socially autistic to fail to see the signs of economic, moral, and structural disintegration at this point. Which leads one to the obvious question: where is our Juvenal?

That there are such things as Manes, and kingdoms below ground, and punt-poles, and Stygian pools black with frogs, and all those thousands crossing over in a single bark—-these things not even boys believe, except such as have not yet had their penny bath. But just imagine them to be true—-what would Curius and the two Scipios think? or Fabricius and the spirit of Camillus? What would the legion that fought at the Cremera think, or the young manhood that fell at Cannae; what would all those gallant hearts feel when a shade of this sort came down to them from here? They would wish to be purified; if only sulphur and torches and damp laurel-branches were to be had. Such is the degradation to which we have come!

Mailvox: gammas and the church

JM wonders about the transformation of the church:

I am sure you’ve gotten quite a bit of mail on the while alpha, delta, sigma discussions, but I have some questions. Just as a delta can model alpha behavior, is it possible that our overly feminized society is creating betas and gammas from alphas (or sigmas)? Would a true alpha tell mom to go pound sand during sensitivity training?

How do you distinguish between socipathic behavior and alpha behavior OR a sigma’s attitudes toward the world and Asperger’s Syndrome? For instance, for all my life, my attitude as been mostly sigma-like, but recently, it’s been pointed out to me that my withdrawal and disinterest is a result of Asperger’s. It bothered me at first, but after thinking about it, I don’t care. I just wish I could make it work for me a little better.

And finally, I have seen gammas (and to a lesser extent omegas) attempt to behave as alphas in situations where there are few true alphas – church groups come to mind. I know many “pastors” who are slimly little, ass kissers who will do anything to get people to like them, but when someone asks them a question beyond their pay grade that challenges their authority, they go into a bitchy little approximation of an uber male. How would you categorize this or is this expected from gammas?

I would say that Western feminized societies are primarily turning betas into deltas and deltas into gammas. The imaginations of many commenters here notwithstanding, there are very few genuine alphas and sigmas about and they tend to be much less subject to social pressures than normal men. Game is threatening to the feminist agenda because it teaches Deltas and Gammas to surmount their assigned status in the social hierarchy by willful and synthetic means. A true alpha isn’t likely to be at for “sensitivity training” in the first place, so I think it would most likely be a Beta who would go, but resist. Alpha behavior is easily distinguished from sociopathic behavior because Alphas are successful, charismatic group animals. It’s the Sigmas and Omegas who are the sociopaths; the Sigmas are the charming ones and the Omegas are the creepy ones. The difference between the Aspie – who is almost always going to be a Gamma or Omega – and the Sigma is that the Aspie has fundamental difficulties with human relations whereas the Sigma makes friends and seduces women with ease. It’s not about introversion vs extroversion and a few people don’t seem to have grasped the point that Sigmas are almost always confused with Alphas, not Gammas or Omegas.

The most important thing to understand is that one’s role in the social structure is not defined by one’s internal motivations, but by the perception of others. One can alter this perception over time, but it’s the perceptions that are the ultimate metric, not the internal dialogue.

As for the pastoral behavior, what you are describing is textbook Gamma behavior. Gammas who find themselves in charge almost invariably behave like petty, micromanaging dictators; Gamma male behavior is very similar to normal female behavior in a lot of ways. It should be no surprise that as the feminization of the church proceeds, the only men who will be left in it will be Gammas since they are quite comfortable with all the bitchy, passive-aggressive political infighting and petty rule-mongering that is the hallmark of female-dominated institutions. Academia is another area that now tends to be overloaded with Gammas, as they are the only men who are not reluctant to submit to female domination. But as various Protestant denominations have been demonstrating in real time, the church that worships at the altar of sexual equality is not a church that will worship Jesus Christ for long.

Mailvox: Surmounting Gamma

An anonymous reader has a request:

Your recent posts on the whole alpha/beta scale and specifically your post “Hierarchy test: the answer key” fits right into somethings I have been pondering in my life. In it you write “Gammas constantly sabotage their efforts to reach their goals because they want them so badly.” and “Gammas always engage in preemptive rejection.”

I have an IQ that is well above average and a somewhat rounded skillset/abilities but despite that I don’t find success and have determined that I am somehow self-sabotaging. Its an unconscious “gift” that I would really like to be rid of and something I have been pondering of late. And while I hadn’t thought of it previously I think that “preemptive rejection” ties right into it.

Now I realize that your post was more to do with Game but that isn’t really what I am looking at. Sure it would be nice to do better with women, but I have a child to take care of and so my focus is more on life in general and I was wondering what advice you might have for those of us who find far too much of your description of Gamma in our lives.

As I have been repeatedly attempting to tell the Deltas, Gammas, and Omegas who wish to identify themselves as anything but what they are, the first step is to recognize clearly where you are perceived on the social hierarchy. Ask five women and five men if you want to get a more objective perspective on it. Others usually view us more clearly than we are able to see ourselves.

The first thing a Gamma has to do is stop seeking the approval of others. Gammas are often easy to identify because when they talk, there is usually an unspoken question in their voice. This can be indicated by hesitancy or a rising tone at the end of the sentence. It’s not a coincidence that this is also how children talk, it’s an indication of instinctive approval-seeking. Like Demosthenes getting rid of his stutter with his stones at the beach, this may require an amount of practice to eradicate. Also note that rather like someone who normally represses his temper tends to lose it with a bang, the Gamma usually overdoes it when he attempts to speak with more authority; inappropriate overemphasis is a dead giveaway of low social status.

But that’s just the outward manifestation of the inner problem…. more later. In the meantime, those of you with positive suggestions might consider offering them.