Rough Men, Rough Justice

Saith Insty, who has said the same thing many times before:

But remember, ultimately the police aren’t there to protect the public from criminals. They’re there to protect criminals from the rough justice meted out by a public that takes matters into its own hands for lack of a better alternative.

Said in response to this:

Progressives nationwide have attacked police and law enforcement, alleging that our legal system is systemically racist and oppressive. They have caused recidivist criminals to haunt our streets and commit more crimes—and have refused to deal with homelessness in spite of the mental illness and drug addictions that so often afflict our cities’ most vulnerable. Numerous efforts to reduce the use of drugs have been rebuffed in the name, of course, of racism.
This approach has unleashed a crime wave and diminished our sense of safety on the streets. It is, therefore, unsurprising to see ever more law-abiding people seeking to arm themselves. As a result, there will be more guns out there, including in the hands of people who should never be near them.

And hot from the news desk:

This is the horrifying moment suspected Haitian gang members beg for mercy before a vigilante lynch mob stones and burns them alive. 
The mob beat and burned 13 men to death with gasoline-soaked tyres on Monday after pulling them from police custody at a traffic stop, police and witnesses in the capital Port-au-Prince said.
Six more burned bodies were seen in a nearby neighbourhood later on in the day, and witnesses claimed to have seen police kill them before residents set them on fire.

And it’s not going to stop:

Residents in the Haitian capital have put gang members on notice and promised they will be lynched if they attempt to seek vengeance for the deaths of 13 alleged accomplices who were stoned and set on fire.

Sounds okay to me.

Of course, pace the “there will be more guns out there, including in the hands of people who should never be near them” trope, one could (and should) argue that there are already guns in the hands of people who should never be near them — those people being gang members — and all that’s happening now is that ordinary people are preparing to take the law back into their own hands because those deputized to enforce the law are unwilling or being prevented from doing so.

Actual Meanings

I have to admit that I’ve missed Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom these past few years — Jeff was one of the First Wave of bloggers, and his writings were always interesting, not to say educational.

As is his latest post.  Witness:

At its essence, stakeholder capitalism is Marxian capitalism run through a lens of business ethics. It is the attempt to maintain authoritarian control over capitalism by forcing upon the Invisible Hand a Velvet Glove, then using that glove, which hides an iron fist, to pound the world into adopting values that both assert and maintain its worldview. It is Theory applied to markets, marketing, wealth creation and management, and an overall globalized ethos of required and policed “virtue,” with the end goal being — as it always is under the discourses of cultural Marxist thought — power: who has it, who controls it, and who uses it for their own ends most effectively and ruthlessly.

Seldom have I seen varied metaphors blended so seamlessly into a single argument.

And the well-stated zinger:

In the stakeholder capitalist system, investors aren’t — or at least, they shouldn’t be — solely interested in profits driven by production and consumption. And this is because to the stakeholder capitalist, itself a euphemism for collectivist corporatist, “it is well proven that our current form of Capitalism is inherently unsustainable because it requires endless growth on a planet with finite resources.”

Of course, none of this is “well proven” — the history of shareholder capitalism suggests the opposite, in fact, as innovation has led to the production of more and more out of less and less — but whether this is or isn’t the material case is incidental to those who are working on this inorganic worldwide paradigm shift commonly known as The Great Reset.

Read the whole thing, because it’s protean.

The “Clean Vs. Dirty” Thing

One of Jeff Goldstein’s fine statements in Maybe I’ll be there to shake your hand (as discussed in the above post) is this one:

The Global Elites behind BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, the WEF, the WHO, the UN, et al., have never liked that presumptuous, barely-credentialed nobodies, can get on planes and travel the globe, just as they do. They never accepted that the filthies can eat a fine rib eye, or drive a nice car, or own a comfortable home — and not have to rely on their largess, or answer to their diktats.

For those who missed the allusion to “filthies”, here’s its foundation:  another Jeff (Tucker) wrote a brilliant piece called Clean vs. Dirty: A Way to Understand Everything, and here’s its basic premise:

It is possible to understand nearly everything going on today – the Covid response, the political tribalism, the censorship, the failure of the major media to talk about anything that matters, the cultural and class divides, even migration trends – as a grand effort by those people who perceive themselves to be clean to stay away from people they regard as dirty.

They don’t want pet waste on their carpet, thus comparing ideas with which they disagree with a nasty pathogen. They are seeking to stay clean.
In this case and in every case, they are glad for the government to operate as the clean-up crew. It’s dirty ideas and people who hold them they oppose. They don’t want to have friends who articulate them or live in communities where such people live.

And the reason they don’t want to deal with people like Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, Elon Musk or, for that matter, any unwashed scum with uncomfortable ideas supported by incontrovertible evidence and/or historical precedent — the reason is that their own worldview is based upon theory and (they think) altruism.  The thing about both theory and altruism is that these are clean philosophies — their motives are pure, you see — and they hate to see those cherished ideals get messed upon when some Unwashed (like, for example, me) points out that their climate “science” is based upon shaky data and wishful thinking, while their predictive models are hopelessly in accurate and cannot form the basis of social or political policy.

The Cleanies likewise hate it when someone lowers income tax rates, because revenues will be “lost” — except, of course, that anyone with the slightest knowledge of history (never mind economics) can point out that when tax rates are cut, tax revenues increase, in some cases massively.

But those messy, messy realities sully the purity of their philosophy, so best to ignore — or better yet, suppress — those dirty realists.

Of course, the reality I’d like to impose on them is fairly simple:

…but no doubt, someone’s going to have a problem with this Occamic proposition.

It might, however, be the only solution — messy though it is.

Tuckered Out

I see that the Dirty Digger has fired Tucker Carlson because reasons (you pick ’em;  they’re probably all correct).

Best comment so far:

No real reason to watch Fox News anymore, even though I only ever watched Tucker and Gutfeld — and Gutfeld’s not enough to hold me.

At the beginning, Roger Ailes was asked by Murdoch what he was going to bring to Fox News, to which Ailes is reputed to have answered, “Half the market” — and then he did just that.

Now, of course, it’s Fox’s turn to wave good-bye to that half of the market as Fox News turns into CNN Lite.

So long, Murdochspawn.

Now THIS Means War

Okay, now it’s time for the pikes to be sharpened:

The light-hearted escapades of Jeeves and Wooster have become the latest victims of the seemingly relentless march of literature’s word police. 
PG Wodehouse’s books on the pair’s aristocratic misadventures have been identified as having what the publishers describe as ‘unacceptable’ prose. 
The comic novels have had passages cut or reworked for new editions by Penguin Random House, as well as trigger warnings added to warn readers of ‘outdated’ themes.

If any body of literature can be classified as “completely harmless”, that would be the collected works of P.G. Wodehouse, quite possibly the world’s greatest-ever humorist.

In fact, the only group of people who could lay claim to being offended by Wodehouse’s writings would be the British aristocracy, whom P.G. universally skewers on the point of his razor-sharp wit.  And they wouldn’t, because as one toff reportedly said, “Every single character in Wodehouse resembles a member of my family”.

But let us not giggle, because there is serious work to be done…

Bastards.

Vandalism

We know that of all the games played in the world, snooker is the worst offender, environmentally-speaking.

Okay, if it isn’t, then how would one explain this activity?

One’s initial reaction to this little silliness, of course, runs to hanging or impalement.  But snooker’s a gentle game, so I think a gentler punishment is called for, something not as extreme.

So if we all agree that flogging is appropriate, then the only remaining question is:

How many strokes? 

Your recommendations in Comments.  I’ll open the bidding at 50.


…and seeing as there are female vandals involved, let’s not forget #MeToo:

It’s only fair and equitable.