Manufacturing Violent People

I agree completely. And it’s getting worse and will continue to get worse with Trump in office. He has sent the message. Violence is the solution. His message is, “my violence is stronger than your violence.” And he has nukes at his disposal. The Ultimate Violence.

Think of how many violent criminals Trump & Sessions are going to create with the DOJ’s announced crackdown on Cannabis. Sessions, a States Rights guy I thought since he was named after Jefferson Davis, is set to challenge States on the legality of Cannabis. Sessions & Trump are going to punish The Little People — the people they purportedly represent with their Populist Pandering.

Not to mention but I will, the DOJ’s crackdown on Cannabis will only help to strengthen the weakening Drug Cartels and that’s great for Trump’s businesses since they like to launder their Blood Money by buying his Tower Condos in cash.

If Sessions and Trump don’t have considerable holdings in prison equities, they should. As their financial advisor, I would advise they purchase significant shares and then have the DOJ throw tens of thousands if not millions of Little People in jail on drug-trafficking and drug-use charges to ensure profitability and a huge ROI.

It’s genius, but you have to be aware & stable to take advantage of such an opportunity and it helps to be a celebrity too and a billionaire because it takes money to make money, don’t you know?

It’s an ideal and model of parenthood and parental obligation that keeps a lot of evil in the world afloat. Prison included.

According to the research, many convicts, particularly those convicted of violent crime, were subject to physical and sexual abuse in childhood and adolescence. Little doubt that bad parenting, bad families and foster care account for manufacturing violent individuals who get into the prison system only to have such tendencies exacerbated by prison life.

I’ll bet that Norway, with a much better safety net and a homogeneous population that doesn’t have the high levels of race discrimination and oppression — leading to a healthier population physically, mentally and emotionally — certainly factors into lower incarceration and imprisonment.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3386595/

http://www.casaforchildren.org/site/c.mtJSJ7MPIsE/b.5525017/k.5115/Justice_Study_Prior_Abuse_Reported_by_Inmates.htm

@mandos,
i’d replace parenthood and parental obligation with christianity and christian obligation. independent of the strain, fundamental, conservative or liberal. the tap root of the all the magical thinking cults under the judeo-christian banner head is blood sport. the central myth of abraham performing child sacrifice with his war god stopping his wrist in midflight. and the central liturgy of the church, drinking blood and eating flesh, symbolic even worse than a real altars with freshly slaughtered youngsters and the meat cutter high priests serving up cups of fresh blood and cuts of fresh meat. and pauly-boy spouting his crazy invention in the book of hebrews, “there is no remission of sins without the shedding of blood.” until such cruel and violent crazed beliefs are gone into the dark night of human history, “wars and rumors of wars” will threaten and haunt and wreck what could be peace on earth.

ps: a sufficient number of prison guards are sociopaths and worse, psychopaths. who the hell but crazies would want to pull 16-shifts in shitland, always watching their backs?

The criminal justice/prison systems are totally fucked up and awful. On every level.

BUT, let’s not pretend that ANYONE has ever managed to effect rehabilitation on any meaningful scale in America. Norway? No similarities.

We can wish for an ideal solution, but that doesn’t get us to where we can have one.

Unfortunately.

That’s certainly gruesome, highrpm, though as accurate and perhaps dogmatic as ‘the root of all evil’. No stranger to parenting, I would venture the patriarchal family model a demonstrably failure.

We want to produce violent people – they are a profit center.

Hmmmmm.

Much as I hate to do so I am going to have to let myself in for some abuse here. While I agree that for ~some~ drug related crimes incarceration is not called for (hell I think for things like weed there shouldn’t even be laws against it), I believe that to be a distraction in the discussion of the greater problem of violence. I’ll even accept that our prison system is corrupt and contributes to making hardened criminals out of ~some~ who could be redeemed.

BUT, to actually submit these arguments when we are trying to discuss the violence that afflicts our nation is a cop out. Obviously some of you are missing the absolute war zone conditions that affect, and have affected, our society long before Miss Nancy’s laughable war on drugs. We’re talking about men who have lost touch with their humanity to such an extent that murder is business as usual and rape is a calming past-time activity.

You want to argue that the system is slanted against minorities? Gotta admit, I believe there is something to that. Want to bring up the fact that there have been, and continue to be, cases where evidence has been manufactured and/or misrepresented? Agree here too. And I’ll admit without caveat that there have been innocent men put to death by the system.

For myself, and a lot like me, the problem is that there needs to be a much higher threshold of evidence for the death penalty than currently exists. But once that threshold is passed there shouldn’t be a death row. There shouldn’t be time to need one. What there should be is a day or two to get your affairs in order and then a sentence carried out at dawn.

None of this bullshit 17 1/2 years of appeals for a guilty sonuvabitch who raped a man’s wife and daughter in front of him before killing the entire family and setting their home on fire to try to hide his crimes. None of this Ted Bundy horseshit of sitting on death row making a bunch of unprincipled lawyers rich for 13 years and then watching these idiotic nuns and long hairs burn candles and sing hymns when this maggot was lined up for Old Sparky. How many of the victim’s families did these demonic possessed nuns and emotionally imbecilic children who protest all of these death penalty cases actually visit?

You know the answer as well as I do.

And you want to try to reform such men?? Go ahead. Hell, if you could give them one on one living conditions to try, they would kill you just to see the look on your face.

The problem isn’t that we treat men too harshly in prison. The problem is that we have a slew of them in prison who don’t belong there and that we coddle the ones who should be there. I have to admit that I have to believe most of you have never been touched by the crimes of such men or you would have a little more insight into why so many are in favor of the death penalty.

Will

The fact of the matter is, increasingly the System is pushing people to a Life of Crime to survive. That’s a fucked up System.

Trump’s Tax Cuts coupled with the GOP Austerity to follow in 2018 will push millions, nay tens of millions, into poverty & immiseration who are already living on the edge. Poverty & Immiseration is a recipe for Crime. The Rich are enabling this every step of the way.

Look at the recent announcement from Walmart. Despite Trump’s Tax Cut, they are shuttering 53 stores and laying off thousands and maybe even tens of thousands when it is all said and done. These are jobs for the those living on the brink of poverty. The people laid off will be forced into poverty and from there they will be forced into Crime. I say forced because this IS NOT THEIR CHOICE. It’s Crime or Die and Crime often leads to death any way.

Meanwhile, Don Lemon tells us that what makes America great is its Diversity. Sure, yeah, bring more immigrants so they can be impoverished & immiserated too, but hey, at least we’ll have Diversity in the Ghettoes. They’re escaping immiseration for immiseration and in doing so add to the immiseration of America. Every immigrant added from here on out will only worsen the situation and expand the Ghettoes.

Orwellian doesn’t even begin to describe this System. It’s Orwell on LSD with leather & whips & chains & ball gags.

Walmart To Lay Off Thousands Of Employees Despite Trump’s Promise That Tax Cuts Would Create More Jobs

as Mandos pointed to above, this is the culture at large. your whole paragraph that reads:

“Hurting people who have already been hurt makes them worse, not better, in most cases. It teaches them that violence is the way of the world, and that the strong do what they will to the weak. Victims become victimizers.”

…is illustrative of the issue. this IS The Culture at large. it is what most people who grow up in this system learn from an early age, after being disabused of kindergarten lessons like “be nice, share and treat people kindly”. that’s just a gloss to get them to sit down and shut up so that the real lesson can begin.

you will sadly never get the bulk of the people in this country on board with your program. they were raised that way, and “they turned out alright”. they have raised their kids that way, perhaps with a nod toward enlightened parenting by not actively beating for misbehavior. you have an abusive culture that programs the nervous system of most people in this country that might makes right, the powerful can do what they want. then you back that up with the economic ideology–winning is everything, and money = winning.

what you get are a nation of sociopaths who believe that they are doing what is “just” and “right” most of the time. who say things like “do the time, since you did the crime” and think that whatever you get while doing it is appropriate. who don’t care because it isn’t someone they know, and it isn’t them, and believe that they would never end up that way because they “follow the rules”. this whole system from the top down is authoritarian. only the “enlightened” and affluent coasts have managed to get away from it, and what they have replaced it with is incomprehensible to the average person.

as with so many issues outlined here, the problem is the culture. how do you change THAT? i know Ian attempts moral instruction here, but to those who mostly don’t need it already. and most people do NOT want to have basic ethics explained to them. they believe that everyone who was 5 years old at one time should know what they know already—don’t be a rulebreaker. or if you do, do it in a way that you won’t get caught (like at work, to underlings and colleagues and anyone you can get away with oppressing, even without overt violence), and do it for bigger stakes than just stealing household goods. in other words, every one in this country is a sociopath and a gambler. and yes, me too. if you grow up in this system, you have to in order to survive and go to work every day. add in misanthropic as well.

@any mouse,
only the “enlightened” and affluent coasts have managed to get away from it, and what they have replaced it with is incomprehensible to the average person

coastal replacement? nada. rather, coastal amplification of winning=everything, money=winning!

amazon is the biomimicry of cancer. the obese cancer cells are temporarily living the good life while they suck the host of it nutrients. i’ve cancelled my amazon prime account. fuk ’em. & google & facebook and apple &…. and if not the cancer biomimicry, then the polar bear waiting at the holes in the ice to bite off the heads of the seals coming up for air. some parts of nature still need some refactoring.

I’ve never been to prison or even arrested (white privilege), but my job has had me spend days inside prisons. Mostly medium/low security, sometimes with significant inmate interaction, but not related to the system such as legal/education/counseling. A weight hangs over those places that’s palpable. I don’t think i’ve met a guard who hasn’t told me his retirement date within the first ten minutes of conversation. They dehumanize everyone who spends significant time inside the perimeter. Those guards (excepting the few who getnoff on the power) hate their job worse than any cubicle slave; they keep it for the same reasons: the only jobs in a lot of places America puts prisons and health insurance.

For those the system aims to dehumanize, it is hell. But you might be surprised at the little sights of humanity the system can’t extinguish. They’re brief and guarded but real. I spent a day watching prisoners in a trades shop and if you didn’t know you were in a prison you wouldn’t have guessed it. But nobody in that shop that was friendly with each other will acknowledge the existence of the others outside the shop. And even though there were several very violent people in the shop there was no violence because it was the place these guys could feel somewhat normal and almost human.

The imprisoned luthier wanted to show me the tools he made so they could build some guitars; the guy convicted of almost murdering a cop with a screwdriver was particularly proud of the chess board and pieces he’d made; and so on. These guys worked and talked together. They were as close to happy as you’ll see in prison. And that made the crushing dehumanizing nature of the place that much worse. Given the ability to be people, those prisoners seriously embraced it such that the shop was their safe space in a sea of wretchedness. The weight of prison becomes a lot more clear when you see inmates relieved of it briefly inside the fence.

@ Will

Thank you for understanding some of the realities that others are ignoring.

Can we do an experiment here? We have a bunch of commenters.

Can we all indicate whether we have ever personally experienced the savagery of a violent crime? It would be interesting to see the correlations.

I’ll start.

Got first bicycle for sixth birthday, first day, rode to park, knocked off bike without warning by two older Puerto Ricans who then rode off on my bike..

Beat up by an older gang at 15 years old, so bad I couldn’t walk for two weeks. I said I had no change for them. Immediately followed by a flying elbow to the back of the head, then a dozen guys stomping me and laughing their heads off, then pulled backwards down a flight of stone steps as I tried to escape into a school building. Gang leader was black guy, rest were white.

Chased twice by people in cars with guns, only dumb luck allowed me to escape in each instance.

Once because a guy cut me off on 42nd street, barely avoided an accident, he stopped at curb and my friend said, “You prick” out the window as we passed by. He then followed us to next red light. Heard woman yell, “George, no!” Next thing, I was staring down the barrel of a gun. Followed by high speed chase through midtown Manhattan. Black guy.

Second time, car tried to deliberately sideswipe me on empty highway, then stopped dead in front of me on 70 mph road at midnight. Also turned into chase, saved only because came across a police cruiser as I fled. Black guy again. I assume he had a gun, because I am big, and also had a big friend with me.

Saved a woman being forced into a car on 14th Street in Manhattan by a very fit-looking Puerto Rican who could have killed me for it, but I bluffed him down.

Saved a nursing student being mugged and beaten by three muggers in Manhattan. Student ran away and left me with them. Fortunately, had my two Akitas with me. Followed them, got them arrested. DA turned them loose, required one to go to an alcoholism program, told me, “He only does crime when he’s drunk.” Had previous conviction for seriously injuring a woman in an apartment break-in. Two whites, one black guy. They belonged to a gang that hung out on my corner. Fortunately, I moved out of Manhattan soon after.

Both the above during the Dinkins years.

Not to mention six vehicles stolen, and more than two dozen car break-ins to steal my stereos.

Leaving out a whole bunch of other times I was put in peril for no reason.

And I never started trouble with anyone in my whole life.

So, I know I should be dead, and am only lucky to be alive.

But I learned.

Now, I have a legal carry permit. (Easy to get here in Georgia, but I also had one in New York where they are almost impossible to get.)

And I know that if I am again put in a situation where a savage threatens my life, I will kill him or them. Because I know what savages are like. And their deaths will be their fault, NOT my fault. And society will not feel the loss of them, because, frankly, their lives are NOT precious, due to their deliberate behavioral choices.

So, could some of those who have expressed such sympathy with the savages please share whether they have EVER had to deal with any of them close up? It might be very instructional.

And before anybody starts the race thing, I’m only stating facts here. I would certainly kill a white person just as readily if they threatened me with serious violence. Because I deserve to live because of how I live, and they deserve to die because of how they live.

Anybody else?

St Louis has the highest violent crime rate (and non), and Irvine has the least. It’s fairly obvious the differences between those two cities.

It should also be obvious that ghetto culture, wherever it’s found (in or outside prisons) is a highly toxic thing, like a cancer. A conservative blogger once held up the Gaza a proof that Palestinians and their Islamic culture were total failures. I had to remind them that Palestinans living in other places such as Jordan or Israel were doing far better by every measure, than those living in the Gazan ghetto. Ghettos anywhere, be it the old Bronx or old London, were nasty violent and hopeless places where “fight or flight” emotions are switched on all the time.

Oversimplification maybe, but I’d think the moral of the story is to prevent the creation of ghettos, especially in prisons where some of the inmates will eventually be released into the general public.

Willy, on this we agree. The ghetto environment turns people into animals. (I have spent a lot of my youth in the worst ghetto in NYC, and my first job as an adult was serving housing summonses in Harlem.)

It is mostly because of poverty. And all the horribles that typically go along with poverty.

Much of the poverty, probably most, is due to single parent households.

Which nobody is willing to criticize, probably because if they do, they might never get laid again lol.

It’s not because of race, it’s because the poverty is worst among the minority races.

But, we still have to deal with what we are presented with in real time, until our shared wishes for change become the reality.

Wishing we already had the perfect world will not keep us safe in the world as presently constituted. And the decent citizens, meanwhile, must be regarded as more valuable than the
savages who live by violent crime.

We may be born equal, but our behavioral choices make us into people of varying value. I think we all believe that deep down, but it’s not pc to say it. I’ll say it, because, personally, I am done with the pc bullshit.

We may be born equal, but our behavioral choices make us into people of varying value.

Value is highly subjective.

Many believe Steve Jobs was a person of incredible value. I disagree. He was a scumbag and his so-called “innovations”, namely the i-Phone coupled with the highly valued tech creeps who developed social media apps, are enabling the destruction of America and The World and yet it’s heralded as an incredible achievement.

Technological Evolution absent Social Evolution equals the steroidal exacerbation of Society’s disfunction.

@STMB

There is subjective, and there is objective. It’s a cop-out to just say, “Subjective,” and then avoid any reasoning process.

I don’t think your opinion of Jobs decides anything. I’m as anti-corporate as you are, though you seem to find that impossible to believe.

But I’m talking about decent, hard-working folks who try to be a positive part of the community vs. extremely violent habitual predators on the streets and, increasingly, invading homes.

If you have difficulty discerning a difference in value between those, I can’t help you.

I have known and loved many wonderful people with dark skin. It was easy, growing up in NYC.

Many blacks men and women (including 4 in my family), Asians, Indians, Iranians, Lebanese. It’s not about skin color. It’s easy for me to see who is decent (even among white people), and even easier to see who is not.

I treat everyone according to their demonstrated character, just like Martin told me I should. I was raised that way, before I ever heard of Martin.

Martin never said we had to love people of bad character. And I won’t.

I think it is insane to treat people of demonstrated bad character as though they had good character.

Especially if you are doing it just because they are your favorite color, gender or ethnicity. But that is what I see the left having become about, and why I push back against it.

It’s too soon to criticize Trump’s character. We need to wait and see what he does. So far, he’s done very little of substance. Let’s see what he does and how he does it in another year or so. And then make a judgment.

/rc, the Peters, and so many other defenders of the indefensible.

As you said, it’s too soon to criticize Trump’s character, and besides, it couldn’t be any worse than Clinton’s or Obama’s, could it? As long as he makes the people you can’t stand squirm, what’s not to like? Right?

Never mind the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands dead in the continuing and expanding imperial wars of aggression under his watch. Never mind the cities destroyed, the millions made refugees. Someone else did something in the past, so you can’t say anything about what Trump does in the present.

Somebody did something in the past and as long as that’s the case, what he does in the present can be forgiven or applauded. He said the things that you want to hear, so it’s all good.

Pretty slow Trump day. Only one porn star and a couple “shithole” countries demanding an apology.

Incidentally, I saw a lot of comments online today from Norwegians saying they don’t want to come here because, compared to Norway, we are a shithole.

Are you equally offended?

Why not?

People from shithole countries shouldn’t take it personally since Trump spent the better part of the last decade calling America a shithole country.

Why are people barred from freely moving and living? When goods and capital aren’t? And when the choicest locales are responsible for the shit perpetrated on the rest?

Assholes made their beds. Hopefully now they will get the delightful comeuppance of lying in them.

@rc

Dude you need to chill before you get your aneurysm.

The fact is it’s not possible for his devotees like you to find his failings let alone to criticize Trump’s character, words or actions simply because you and likeminded people have too much investment in his supposed disruptiveness of the status quo.

It’s all good as long as he says what you want to hear and he annoys your enemies.

He’s a violent person as are many of his devotees — even if for now their violence is mostly in their fantasy. They see themselves as empowered (once again) through the genius of Trump — who can simply do no wrong.

That’s why I bring up the tens of thousands dead and the dozens of cities destroyed in his expanded wars of aggression; it’s on him, not Obama or Bush or Clinton. But if the dead and destroyed under Trump are even recognized by his followers (mostly they’re not) they are ritualistically blamed on Obama and Clinton (Bush has been almost completely disappeared) because Trump can simply do no wrong, and those who preceded him are responsible for all bad things anyway.

I’d just add before you pop your other vein that some of us have been through even worse experiences than you describe happened to you. Most of us have no interest in discussing them with you.

When you’re in a reflective mood, you might contemplate why.

That’s why I bring up the tens of thousands dead and the dozens of cities destroyed in his expanded wars of aggression; it’s on him, not Obama or Bush or Clinton.

Exactly. Trump wants to take credit for the alleged “Booming Economy” as if the notional value of an Equities Bubble is the Economy, yet he wants to blame military fiascos on his predecessors or anything negative that occurs under his “Watch.” I put “Watch” in quotes because I’m being facetious. The only thing he watches is CNN & MSNBC & the NYT & the Washington Post for coverage of him so he can Tweet back, as a fellow troll, to the trolling MSM. It’s a Battle of Trolls 24/7 now and it’s GREAT FOR RATINGS and thus ROI.

Trump is responsible for the following. This is Making America Great Again. Remember, he is doubling down on Afghanistan at the request of Mattis who likes murdering “Towel Heads.” Mattis is on record as saying it’s fun. The guys in the following link to Moon of Alabama blog are having fun too. And then they come home and they’re your neighbors. What great neighbors they’ll be. Thank you for your service. Support The Troops. Here’s your military discount for shooting innocent Afghani locals in the head for no good reason as if there is ever a good reason.

President Trump outlined a revised vision for the U.S. war in Afghanistan on Monday, pledging to end a strategy of “nation-building” and instead institute a policy aimed more squarely at addressing the terrorist threat that emanates from the region.

The following year, however, he was condemned for saying “it’s fun to shoot some people” while talking to service members in San Diego.

“Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot,” he said during the panel discussion. “It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.

“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

Afghanistan – U.S. Special Forces Commit Drive-By Murder (Video)

The irony is not lost on me that the author of Moon of Alabama blog and his Commentariat advocated for Trump and helped get him elected along with countless others who fail to understand that the enemy of your enemy is not your friend and is in fact not even the enemy of your enemy but you will continue to obstinately believe it because you’re a purposefully ignorant asshole or, worse, an egomaniacal sadist.

It should have been clear to anyone with more than a brainstem that Trump was not the answer unless the answer is more of the same and even worse.

As an Israeli and Zionist Apologist, where’s your concern?

Human trafficking report ranks Israel with 3rd world nations

US State Department annual Trafficking in Persons report paints grim picture of phenomenon, states ‘Israel is destination-country for men, women subjected to forced labor, sex trafficking’

That article is from 2011. Look at the State Department today. Decimated & Feckless. By design, I say, and Trump was, and is, the instrument to accomplish the task and so many more tasks like moving the recognized Capital of Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as the Settlements continue unabated and Palestinians continue to live under Occupation by both Israel and Hamas.

Who cares about these Sex Slaves anyway, right? They’re “Cows” so they deserve what they get. Just ask Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein or Bill Clinton or Donald Trump or Kevin Spacey since they’re all in Epstein’s Little Black Book.

Stevie is off his meds again.

That last comment is probably enough all by itself to get you committed for your own protection lol.

Fun fact question of the day: who is Emma Lazarus?

Hint: Not some French guy of 200 years ago.

You appear unable to grasp the concept of “relatively new” phenomenon, the fundamental differences between the models, and perhaps even the simple combination of new english words ‘men have been abandoning their children for eons’. Women were heading households and communities long before the Jew “Christian” Muslim Mormon Cult of White Male Domination usurped their rightful role in the proper ordering of the world.

That in your mere three thousand year history you’ve managed to come real close to destroying the only part of the planet, indeed the only place in the universe we know of where we can live is definitive evidence of the failure of the patriarchal model.

All else: government, War, Zuckerberg’s Famous Pig (facebook), the Church, pornography serve naught but to reinforce the failure.

@Che Pasa:

Cut RC some slack. You’d be angry and bitter too if you had to invest your hopes and dreams into a sleazeball like Donald Trump.

Since things are so different today, I’d think the goal is to keep from becoming the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning for a moment’s freedom from a kleptocratic dystopia.

What is Trump doing to keep that from happening?

@ Ten Bears

Well, the last three thousand years might have SOME relevance, but in fairness, I will listen if you care to tell us what communities and societies you are referring to.

I’m open to learning, but don’t give me bullshit examples please.

@peter,

That expansion opportunity is long gone, there is no frontier to populate or new industry to help build. An idealistic sounding poem from a hundred years ago can’t change the reality of today.

again, much thx to the creativity of man and his blind pursuit of the possible, regardless of its effects generations down the road. let’s not forget the effects of the haber-bosch process on mankind, both in war and peace. its making possible both killing greater numbers in war and feeding greater numbers in peace.

@tsmb,
appears that the hollyworld cults and the abrahamic cults have a similar statistical dysfunction, borderline sexual personality disorder. higher-than-normal number of members have real trouble managing their sexual impulses.

Fun logical precept of the day: when considering American ideology, it’s more convincing to cite American authors rather than assigning their writings to foreigners.

Israel haters. We must arm Israel with nukular weaponry. We must build many American bases from which to attack the Shiites, the Sunnis, the Iranians and Hezbollan carpet merchants. Think of all the military industrial complex we’re missing out on.

Self-defense haters. We brave and heroic fighters must move to the places where all these shithole immigrants have been moving to, then show them who’s boss. We must ally with the racists and our Dear Leader Trump (so sadly misunderstood thanks to the fake media and fake entities like the FBI and that yugely fake Clinton henchman Mueller) and know that He is a stable genius who will make American Great Again (as it once was) so that even the Norwegians will want to move here again.

Hugh is right. Modern conservatism’s belief that making the ground more fertile for only those at the top, doesn’t work. The results are the results.

Incarceration works, but only up to a point, after which you have diminishing returns. Modern conservatism is the same thing. Like any cult, core ideas that worked up to a point, are then pushed and pushed by Dear Leaders beyond practicality to where it’s now all fucking nonsense with disastrous results which can only be supported with lies and ad hominem attacks on the non-believers.

@ “realitychecker”,

Admit it. Once upon a time, you came here to “realitycheck” the Reality Based community of progressives. When you couldn’t explain to them why their thinking was wrong, you became compelled to smear them as wrong thinkers.

Meanwhile, everything progressives said about Iraq turned out to be correct. Everything progressives said about tax cuts for the wealthy turned out to be correct. Everything progressives said about conservatism once being a legitimate school of thought, but is now nothing more than a bastion of nonsensical cult thinking has turned out to be correct. Why should be hold ourselves to that standard, when they are the ones who need to grow up?

If I met a hoodlum on the street and he wanted my money, I’d do what any progressive would do. I’d try to size up the situation, act in accordance, then reflect on results, good or bad, afterwards. A modern conservatives would wet their pants, have their weapon stolen, get hammered, then hit the blogs afterwards to cry about a lack of law enforcement, guns, and the overflow of shithole immigrants, and blame “the other side” for everything wrong in America.

“It’s too soon to criticize Trump’s character. We need to wait and see what he does.”

Yeah, give the poor guy at least to age 80.

@ realitychecker

You forgot penises.

“Nice to know we have another lobotomized anti-Semite here.”

Will someone please drag these toothless and unshaven old drunken bums off the Web?

Just to add, all the cheap labor immigrants take away from the blacks and their community resources more directly than from anyone else.

Dems have ridden on the backs of blacks as long as that worked for them, but now they are willing to throw blacks under the bus for the (perceived) better demographic bet with the Latinos and other Third World immigrants.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

“Some French guy”, as realitychecker noted, was Édouard René de Laboulaye, president of the Société d’économie politique, which was founded by Jean-Baptiste Say, of the infamously neoliberal Says Law, which says loosly, that production creates demand.

In other words, all the wealthy have to do is produce a desirable thing, and the poor will buy it up. Unless the poor can’t afford it, or the wealthy decide to buy back shares instead, in which case, the poor resort to stealing the desirable thing.

And we wind up back at prisons, again.

You know, nihil, you’re a real moron.

You think all that matters is that I thought the French statue might have come complete with the inscription you relied on. And that I was off on the creation date by 50 years or so.

Fine, I got that wrong, without doing research, relying on childhood memory. It wasn’t written by a Frenchman, it was written by a Zionist and Manifest Destiny enabler.

Now, tell me, what difference does your stupid little quibble about the date and author make, when I have shown very carefully and thoroughly that you got the ENTIRE CONCEPT you were arguing for completely wrong. On every count.

Where is your apology, moron?

@ Tom

Yeah, Tom, well, when someone types that all we’d get from Jews is “bankers, comedians, and knish stands,” most sentient beings recognize that as classic anti-Semitic rhetoric. Worthy of Kluxers and Nazis.

To pretend that the Jews have not given the world more doctors and scientists per capita than any other group is hate speech, nothing less.

Are you sentient, Tom?

Fun aphorism of the day: When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Can’t we just all agree that there are very fine people amongst knish peddlers, the Kluxers and the Nazis?

Willy
January 14, 2018

As to who MFI is, I couldn’t say. He’s not an American.
But, read what he says, it’s analytical, not political.
MFI does hold the American left in contempt, as well he should, IMO.
MFI hasn’t posted here for quite some time for obvious reasons.
Likely the same, or close, to why I not longer post, but rarely.

@W

MFI is a retired UN peacekeeper and an European Christan Conservative who brought a ME perspective from his years there to FDL and then here. He stopped commenting here because of the idiots who make stupid comments such as you did above.

I do not support the death penalty for many reasons but the most prominent reason is because I do not want to confer this power to The State. I believe in limiting the power of The State and conferring the power to murder to The State, and the death penalty is murder, is anathema to that. If we create a society based on certain principles, we can achieve Egalitarianism which over multiple generations becomes rather organic and self-perpetuating. In such a Society, the power of The State will be limited in scope & breath. Conferring to The State the power to murder is completely contrary to my notion of an Egalitarian society.

I think those who are OBVIOUSLY guilty of heinous crimes against humanity, and rape is such a crime, should be given a choice. Solitary Confinement for Life or they can choose suicide. They should have the right to take their own life and The State will enable that process. Of course, this would require a completely new Justice System than the one America currently has. One where prosecutors, or what are akin to prosecutors in the new System, are not incentivized to pin a crime on an innocent person who can’t defend themselves because they need another feather in their cap on their way to District Attorney and Mayor.

Some criminal freaks cannot be rehabilitated. Sex offenders are one such group. What they do is really not sex. It’s much more than a sexual impulse. Their brains are fucked up and we do not yet possess the scientific knowledge on how to unfuck their brains, therefore, they cannot live amongst people who’s brains are not fucked up, or at least not fucked up in that way. They are predators and can’t help themselves. They fully admit this. Do the research.

This has become somewhat about how people get to prison rather than what happens to them once there.

So, first, on trials: this is how we determine who is guilty. The standard in a criminal trial is reasonable doubt, and that’s left to the jury because theoretically it’s up to members of the society what risk they want to run. Make “beyond reasonable doubt” harder to get to, and more guilty people will be declared not guilty. Make it easier to get to, and more innocent people will be punished. So do we want to run a higher risk of freeing the guilty or imprisoning the innocent? An obvious, troubling aspect of the system is that juries judge the risk of having different kinds and classes of defendants running around free differently.

Even more troubling is that over 90% of prisoners in federal prisons haven’t been convicted of the crime for which they are imprisoned. A plea bargain put them there.

Since it is inevitable that a system depending so heavily on incarceration will imprison a significant number of people inequitably and unjustly, justice, if not morality, demands that we treat prisoners humanely.

I wonder how these postmodern ideas about the treatment of convicted criminals will make society safer. Trying to turn the criminals into some kind of victim and blaming their crimes on the prison system is a strange bit of warped logic.

Most inmates don’t seem to be violent and the violent criminals are segregated from the general population in maximum security units. Most convicts return to prison because they are criminals not because prison bullies make them violent.

Junkies go to prison because of crimes they commit besides being a junkie and most will never want to be cured. Restitution just as rehabilitation are wishful thinking for most of these people. Most return to crime and those who might work make little money to live on and none for restitution.

Throwing the banker in with the junkie was too clever by half and ignores the fact that the banks have paid hundreds of billions of dollars in restitution for their crimes and a lot for things that weren’t crimes.

@ Tom W. Harris

Tom, please accept my most sincere and abject apology for misreading you. I really mean that.

I sometimes feel like a bear being beset by a dozen fact-and-logic-challenged chihuahuas here. I mistook you, in my haste and the heated and frustrating nature of the conversation, for another chihuahua. I admit I am beside myself seeing the incredibly idiotic things these people are saying and thinking. I always thought we on the left were supposed to be the clear thinkers lol. Doing a reality check on that belief now, in real time. (sigh)

I’ll be more careful about you from now on. 🙂

@ Chge Pasa

Hey Che, where is that fucking lying quote you tried to attribute to me?

Suck down some more tequila, maybe you’ll be able to find it then.

@realitychecker

If you are not clearly and cleanly explaining/dissing the “incredibly idiotic things”, then you are doing nothing more than wasting everybody’s time with the childish namecalling. It is not your job, but the childish namecalling diverts the discussion more than is already will be. And I’m trying hard to hold my snipey back of the class clown impulses in check. But everybody has their limits.

If you are the stable genius with 16 years experience which you claim, it should be an almost effortless task. Unusually elegant smackdowns of irrationality might even win points, even if it involves my own commentary.

NOBODY here who wants to coddle criminals has stepped up to say they have any experience with violent street crime. How many times do I need to make this challenge?

Fun to spout off about life-or-death shit you know nothing about, isn’t it, folks? Too fucking bad for all the real victims that suffer for your policy preferences, amirite?

The modern left obviously wants to act like we are in a perfect world, confusing a wished-for ideal with the very NOT IDEAL world we currently occupy.

Stop posing as smart people, it’s ridiculous.

If we had any honest people here, we could have a very deep and important conversation about the multitudinously varying ways we value human life.

Not with this addled crowd, though. They prefer a steady diet of contradictions and erroneous ‘logic.’

I know that if I am again put in a situation where a savage threatens my life, I will kill him or them. Because I know what savages are like. And their deaths will be their fault, NOT my fault. And society will not feel the loss of them, because, frankly, their lives are NOT precious, due to their deliberate behavioral choices.

Please revise I would probably shoot a junkie caught raiding my garage

To I would probably shoot a life threatening junkie caught raiding my garage

IMVHO, I think the discussion about crime and incarceration, Norway vs. USA, should continue. My apologies for all the distractions. I couldn’t care less if the discussion happens without me, as long as we get some insights here.

Are there any state prison systems within the USA where restorative justice has even in part, seen some of the success in the direction of Norway? I know there are many variables, some of which may be different from that country. What are they? Do they even matter?

@ nihil

Yeah, your argument was that modern immigration policy must conform to the words from a Zionist’s and American Western Expansionist’s poem on a plaque on the Statue of Liberty that was written in the 1800’s..

What a waste of time it is to try and reason with you.

@ nihil

Here you go. I guess your stupid and continuing attempts at lame sarcasm occluded your thought process and memory. You said:

“nihil obstet permalink
January 13, 2018

Fun fact question of the day: who is Emma Lazarus?”

Hint: Not some French guy of 200 years ago.”

And:

” nihil obstet permalink
January 13, 2018

Fun logical precept of the day: when considering American ideology, it’s more convincing to cite American authors rather than assigning their writings to foreigners.”

I said:

realitychecker permalink
January 13, 2018

@ nihil obstet

You attempt an irrelevant gotcha, given that in the mid-1800’s we were desperate for immigrants to fill an empty continent. Not at all like today, which was my very point. But you and your flying monkeys love it when you say this:

” nihil obstet permalink
January 13, 2018

Fun fact question of the day: who is Emma Lazarus?

Hint: Not some French guy of 200 years ago”

So, let me invite you stupid losers to chew on this, from Wikipedia, till you (hopefully) choke yourselves into a blue state:

“An important forerunner of the Zionist movement, Lazarus argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before Theodor Herzl began to use the term “Zionism”.[29]”

Do you morons STILL want to promote the blind acceptance of whatever old Emma had to say?

God help us survive you morons. :-0″

And then, to make it even clearer when you failed to understand that you lost the argument:

“realitychecker permalink
January 13, 2018

@ nihil obstet, and others

You know, trying to make sweeping real-time arguments based on one’s own twisted beliefs about history is a dangerous thing. As is trying to rely on ‘symbolism’ to explain real time events.

You inspired me to read Wikipedia’s entry on the Statue of Liberty. I advise everyone to do so.

They would see that the fucking statue itself was NEVER INTENDED TO BE ABOUT ANYTHING BUT LIBERTY!!!!!!!

Never intended to have anything to do with immigration AT ALL.

Anybody feeling stupid yet?

(As an aside, how about this, from the time when they were trying to raise money for the pedestal?:

“The New York Times stated that “no true patriot can countenance any such expenditures for bronze females in the present state of our finances.”[70] Faced with these criticisms, the American committees took little action for several years.[70]”)

Lazarus was an early Zionist who also believed in displacing the Native Americans. Her poem was part of the fund-raising effort, meant to be auctioned off. If you are depending on her, you are a supporter of Israel and of Native American genocide. Good job, idiots.

Oh, and no women were allowed at the dedication ceremony, save two related to the creators. Suffragettes protested from boats.

So, how badly defective a brain must one have to use the “huddled masses” phrase as the determining argument in deciding whether we should stuff our country full of people fleeing Third World shitholes, or hellholes, choose your own preferred term for the places nobody wants to be.

All this, whilst the Dems and their supporters argue you can’t send temporary visa holders back to their countries after 15 years because they are such terrible places. Gimme a fucking break already!

Now let me make a larger point, one that really matters RIGHT NOW. The Dems are trying to pretend to be the friends to both the blacks and the Latinos. Those groups have real life interests that are DIRECTLY OPPOSED to each other. As many black pundits are happy to tell you right now.

You can’t be friends to both, without being a total hypocrite. But every single idiot who attacks me here is buying into that bullshit line.

How do you live with yourselves?”

NOW can you see what a waste of time and effort it is to interact with you? It really is.

Fun time-saving tip of the day: When it’s a waste of time and effort to interact with someone, don’t do it.

@ Willy

Apology accepted. Can we please stay on a better basis going forward? I would appreciate it, and I know Ian would as well.

I’ve been working these issues since I was a young man, have read, studied, argued them so many, many times over the years, both inside and outside the criminal justice system, with all kinds of people, and it’s amazing how little the conversation has changed.

I can’t share everything I know with you, but this is really the crux of the matter:

It’s legal to use deadly force when you have a reasonable perception that you or others are being threatened with serious injury or death. That has always been, and always will be the law in this country, and, I think it is also a moral position to live by. It accords with the basic natural law of self-preservation, which is why it is so widely applied.

Interestingly, for all the experiences I’ve had around these issues, I have never had to actually put my hands on or otherwise hurt ANYBODY. I’ve bluffed through or avoided a lot of things, for which I am thankful, because if I was to actually use my right to self-defense, the system in most places would still ruin my life and finances. It’s not a thing to be wished for, and folks like V. Arnold who want to paint me as WANTING to use force against somebody are simply insane.

Re ‘restorative justice,’ classically there were 4 justifications for imposing prison on someone.
1. Removing them from where they can commit more crime;
2. Deterring others from committing crime;
3; Retribution (pure punishment);
4. Rehabilitation

In the last century, we moved away from retribution, deeming it an unworthy motivation (I disagree vehemently, bad consequences shape behavior very well, as you can judge from your own personal life, I would think.)

It was said we would thenceforth rely on rehabilitation to shape future behavior of convicts.

But nobody has had much success in rehabilitating large numbers of people, and it’s very expensive, so now there is a bare pretense of still being able to accomplish much through rehabilitation.

Norway is so different from the U.S. that it makes no sense to blindly accept its policies here.

That’s the nutshell version. 🙂

I hope we can all use MLK Day to remind ourselves that Martin said our personal character as revealed by our behavior was all that should matter.

@ Willy

I was an incorrigible class clown myself early in life, always on a first name basis with the school deans thru high school, so rest assured I appreciate the joys and also the occasional great comedic value of having such voices around. Even yours on occasion lol.

But when it diverts a serious conversation in a significant way, it takes away from the opportunity to have a serious conversation. Typing a long, thoughtful comment on a Dell laptop, where the cursor relocates itself seemingly every time I touch the comma key, is impediment enough, IMHO.

But unfair attacks that go unrebutted serve to diminish the credibility of the one attacked unless they are immediately responded to, and I know you have seen that. Our credibility is all we are online, if you think about it, so attacking someone’s cred in an unfair way is like murdering their online persona. Which is why I always respond. (And I have shared this view privately with Ian.)

Much better to never have the original unfair attack, even those that imply via sarcasm or outrageous mis-paraphrasing, which are both rampant online. (Maybe especially those, since their lack of specificity opens the door to limitless negative suppositions, while presenting no specific thing to rebut against.)

I get that a ‘tribal’ website of any sort will be hostile to any departure from the local dogma, and I don’t mind responding to civil and articulate objections to any of the thoughts I share here in good faith. But please believe me when I say that my heart has always been and always will be mostly with the progressive side of the political spectrum (only cast one vote for a Republican in my whole life!!!!), and I only raise the criticisms I raise because I don ‘t want my side to be in error, as they clearly are on some points at some times, and on other points almost all the time. When a big contradiction can be articulated, clearly someone has something wrong, n’est-ce pas? That is all I try to point out most of the time.

Anyway, to your substance, the “unworthy’ connotation came mostly from the religious, in my understanding, who want to believe that the Lord takes vengeance, so society is wrong to do so.
But any behavioral psychologist will tell you that negative reinforcement is by far the most effective way to permanently extinguish undesirable behaviors. BUT, and here is the rub, the negative reinforcement is more effective as it is closer in time to the bad behavior, instantaneous being the best time frame. Of course, we don’t get that in the system as presently constituted. It’s not the psychology’s fault lol. And, as noted, some behaviors, like rape and pedophilia, nobody seems to know how to extinguish.

Re Norway, the high level socialist model prevailing there removes poverty as a causative factor in their crime picture, and their homogeneity avoids all the incredible difficulties that present when you try to administer justice fairly and equally among many different social ‘tribes’ who are perpetually antagonistic toward all the other tribes. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see why this is so.

Death penalty was raised somewhere above, so I’ll also say that I support it for the most serious crimes, but only when the evidence is irrefutably conclusive, which is rare but does sometimes occur (e.g. DNA present with conclusive surrounding circumstances, clear video, corroborated confessions), not solely on, e.g., single eyewitness testimony which has proven to be very unreliable in history. We must never execute an innocent person.

Have a great day, Willy.

Gramps got quite a little outing yesterday. Nice to see he’s calmed down a little bit. Fox can sure wind him up, though.