Now, what has replaced this abhorrent socio-political system [apartheid] is not good, at all; indeed, what has since happened in South Africa is typical of most African countries: massive corruption, bureaucratic inertia, inefficiency and incompetence, and a level of violence which makes Chicago’s South Side akin to a holiday resort. (For those who wish to know the attribution for much of the above, I recommend reading the chapter entitled “Caliban’s Kingdoms” in Paul Johnson’s Modern Times.) Where South Africa differs from other African countries is twofold: where in the rest of Africa the preponderance of violence and oppression was Black on Black — and therefore ignored by the West — apartheid was a system of White on Black oppression (and therefore more noticeable to Western eyes). The second difference is that apartheid exacerbated the virulence of the “grievance” culture which demands reparations (financial and otherwise) for the iniquities of apartheid. This continues to unfold, to where the homicide rate for White farmers — part of the taking of farmland from Whites — is one of the highest in the world, and the capture and conviction rates for the Black murderers among the lowest — a simple inversion of the apartheid era.
Speaking with hindsight, however, it would be charitable to suggest […] that apartheid was “simply a logical adaptation to the presence of a population that simply cannot support or sustain a First World standard of living, done by people who very much valued the First World society they had created”. While that statement is undoubtedly true, up to a point, and it could be argued that apartheid was a pragmatic solution to the chaos evident throughout the rest of Africa, it cannot be used as an excuse. Indeed, such a labeling would give, and has given rise to the notion that First World systems are inherently unjust, and a different label “colonialism” — which would include apartheid — can be applied to the entirety of Western Civilization.
The fact of the matter is that when it comes to Africa, there is no good way. First World — i.e. Western European — principles only work in a socio-political milieu in which principles such as the rule of law, free trade, non-violent transfer of political power and the Enlightenment are both understood and respected. They aren’t, anywhere in Africa, except where such adherence can be worked to temporary local advantage. Remember, in the African mindset there is no long-term thinking or consideration of consequence — which is why, for example, since White government (not just South African) has disappeared in Africa, the infrastructure continues to crumble and fail because of a systemic and one might say almost genetic indifference to its maintenance. When a government is faced with a population of which 90% is living in dire poverty and in imminent danger of starvation, that government must try to address that first, or face the prospect of violent revolution. It’s not an excusable policy, but it is understandable.
That said, there is no gain in rethinking apartheid’s malevolence […] because apartheid was never going to last anyway, and its malevolence was bound to engender a similar counter-malevolence once it disappeared. Which is the main point to my thinking on Africa: nothing works. Africa is simply a train-smash continent, where good intentions come to nought, where successful systems and ideas fail eventually, and where unsuccessful systems (e.g. Marxism) also fail, just fail more quickly.
Kim du Toit, “Tough Question, Simple Answer”, Splendid Isolation, 2019-12-05.
July 5, 2024
QotD: South Africa after Apartheid
June 25, 2024
QotD: Progress and decline
So progress must have occurred in the intervening time, despite the pessimism that infects those who, like me, are of retrospective temperament and hypersensitive to deterioration. It is not hard to enumerate many things that have improved. They relate principally, but not only, to material conditions. My best friend when I was very young was one of the last children in Britain to suffer from polio, which paralyzed him from the waist down. The quickest form of written communication was then the telegram, and anything other than local telephone calls had to go through an operator. To call across the Atlantic required a reservation and was ferociously expensive; the resultant conversation always seemed to take place during a violent storm. In England, the food was generally disgusting, and meals were to be endured as a regrettable necessity instead of enjoyed (it puzzles me still how people could have cooked so badly). Cars broke down frequently, and every November, pollution produced fogs so thick that you couldn’t see the hand in front of your face (I loved them). Rationing continued for eight years after the war, and disused bomb shelters, present in every park, were where illicit sexual fumbles and smoking took place. Incidentally, for an adult male not to smoke was unusual (75 percent did so); we must have lived in a perpetual fog of foul-smelling tobacco, to judge by the distaste caused by even a single lit cigarette in these virtuous times. Poverty, as raw necessity, still existed. Murderers were sometimes hanged — as well as, more rarely, the innocent. Overt racial prejudice was, if not quite the norm, certainly prevalent.
Yet not everything has improved, though the deterioration has been less tangible than the progress. To give one example: by age 11, I was free to roam London, or at least its better areas, by myself or with a friend of the same age. The sight of an 11-year-old child wandering the city on his own did not suggest to anyone that he was neglected or abused. I remember, too, the evening papers piled up at newsstands; people would throw coins on top of the pile and take their copy. It never occurred to anyone that the money might get stolen; nowadays, it would never occur to anyone that the money would not be stolen. The crime statistics bear out this sea change in national character.
Theodore Dalrymple, “What Seventy Years Have Wrought”, New English Review, 2019-10-26.
June 24, 2024
June 14, 2024
Britain’s anti-gay hate crime epidemic
Andrew Doyle suggests you take the recent reports of burgeoning hate crime in Britain with a fair bit of salt, because the hate crime statistics are far from trustworthy:
When things like this can be reported as “hate crimes”, and the definition depends on the reporter’s assumption of hateful intent, you’re going to see a lot more “hate crimes”.
We all know by now that the Metro is an activist publication masquerading as a newspaper. And so we ought to approach with some caution its article this week claiming that the UK has seen a surge in hate crime against gay people. There’s even a handy rainbow-coloured map which pinpoints the most homophobic locations in the country. Thankfully St Ives isn’t on the list, so I won’t have to cancel my holiday.
What are we to make of the article’s claim that there has been a 462% increase in homophobic hate crime and a 1,426% increase in transphobic hate crime since 2012? The source for these remarkable figures is the House of Commons Hate Crime Statistics report. If true, it would seem to confirm activists’ claims that we are living in an anti-LGBTQIA+ hellhole.
The truth is not so melodramatic. The supposed escalation of hate crimes in the UK can be accounted for by the way in which they are now recorded. Police actively trawl for complaints, inviting citizens to report offensive comments or any action – criminal or otherwise – that the “victim” perceives to have been motivated by prejudice. No evidence of “hate” is required for it to be recorded as such, other than the assumption of the complainant. With such methodology in place, it is inevitable that the statistics will rise.
And perhaps that’s the whole point. The police in the UK are just one of the many major institutions that has been captured by intersectional ideology. Police are regularly seen dancing at Pride parades, driving rainbow-coloured cars, and harassing gender-critical women for wrongthink. In February 2021 in Merseyside – a county that tops the Metro‘s list of homophobic hate spots – police were photographed next to a digital advertisement which read “Being offensive is an offence”. This belief-system can only be sustained by the narrative of widespread hate, and so we should not be surprised to see that police practice has been modified to ensure this outcome.
In fact, the College of Policing had made it clear that a fall in hate crime statistics would not be acceptable. Its operational guidance says that “targets that see success as reducing hate crime are not appropriate”. And by the Home Office’s own admission, “increases in police-recorded hate crime in recent years have been driven by improvements in crime recording and a better identification of what constitutes a hate crime”. In other words, there is no hate crime epidemic at all. It’s simply that the definitions have expanded.
Rather than rely on the Home Office statistics, we would be better turning to a source that hasn’t been corrupted by ideology. The Crime Survey for England and Wales hasn’t adopted the new police methods of recording, and shows that hate crime has been consistently dropping. Between 2008 and 2020, the number of hate crimes fell by 38%, and all the while records of hate crime kept by the police kept on rising. The disparity between the reality and the narrative couldn’t be more stark.
May 28, 2024
QotD: Women’s voting interests
“I have to vote Conservative, for his sake,” she reasonably explained.
She had compounded his characteristic error in 1968, however, and felt she owed an explanation to her son. This began by reminding me of her fragile, female sex.
“One thinks of the party leader on the analogy of going for a date.”
And true enough, the Tory leader, Mr Robert Stanfield, was the sort of man you could present to your father. He could be relied on, to get you home safely, and on time.
“But there are times when a woman does not want to get home on time,” mama added.
She, a registered nurse acquainted with the eccentricities of mental patients, called my attention to a phenomenon I had not previously noticed. Whenever a truly monstrous (male) psychopath is strapped away in gaol, the prison receives adoring letters for him, from women. These correspondents have never met him, and know him only from accounts in the yellow press. He may have been found guilty of heinously murdering a succession of wives and lovers. But they promise to be waiting for him on the steps of the penitentiary; and as the police will confirm, they are still there.
My mother had never comprehended how a woman could be so crazy. But when she realized that she had herself just voted for “Pierre” [that’s Trudeau the elder, to clarify], she suddenly understood.
David Warren, “The women’s vote”, Essays in Idleness, 2024-02-22.
May 19, 2024
QotD: Taxation and theft
An analogy: your house and your neighbour’s house are both burgled. You lose a television. He loses a DVD player, microwave, his collection of Chomsky memorabilia (it’s an inner-city house), and a unique framed Leunig depicting Mr Curly’s pedophilia arrest. Would it be unfair if police were to return all of this fellow’s belongings, and you were only to get back your 24-inch Sony?
Tim Blair, “Simplistic right-wing greed justification attempted”, Road to Surfdom, 2005-05-12.
[H/T to Samizdata, both for the link and for their title on the post, which I’ve purloined.]
May 6, 2024
QotD: Confident cultures … unlike our modern one
Only in the modern period do we feel we need black-letter law for everything. And once we’ve got formal law, of course, the very next thing we do is start carving out penumbras and emanations, because we are so far from a self-confident culture that we must constantly prove to ourselves what clever, clever boys we are …
Severian, “Barely Legal”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-21.
April 24, 2024
Australia cribs from Trudeau’s notes and tries to censor the internet outside their borders
Tim Worstall explains to the Australian federal government why their attempt to force Elon Musk to obey Australian diktats on Twit-, er, I mean “X” outside Australia is extreme over-reach and should be firmly rejected:
It’s entirely true that Elon Musk is a centibillionaire currently telling the Australian Government that they can fuck off. It’s also true that if Elon Musk were of my level of wealth — or perhaps above it and into positive territory — he should be telling the Australian Government to fuck off.
This also applies to the European Union and that idiocy called the right to be forgotten which they’ve been plaguing Google with. Also to any other such attempts at extraterritoriality. Governments do indeed get to govern the places they’re governments of. They do not get to rule everyone else — the correct response to attempts to do so is fuck off.
So, Musk is right here:
What this is about doesn’t really matter. But, v quickly, that attack on the Armenian Church bishop is online. It’s also, obviously, highly violent stuff. You’re not allowed to show highly violent stuff in Oz, so the Oz government insist it be taken down. Fair enough – they’re the government of that place. But they are then demanding further:
On Monday evening in an urgent last-minute federal court hearing, the court ordered a two-day injunction against X to hide posts globally….
Oz is demanding that the imagery be scrubbed from the world, not just that part of it subject to the government of Oz. Leading to:
Australia’s prime minister has labelled X’s owner, Elon Musk, an “arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law”
And
Anthony Albanese on Tuesday said Musk was “a bloke who’s chosen ego and showing violence over common sense”.
“Australians will shake their head when they think that this billionaire is prepared to go to court fighting for the right to sow division and to show violent videos,” he told Sky News. “He is in social media, but he has a social responsibility in order to have that social licence.”
To which the correct response is that “Fuck off”.
For example, I am a British citizen (and would also be an Irish one if that country ever managed to get up to speed on processing foreign birth certificates) and live within the EU. Australian law has no power over me — great great granny emigrated from Oz having experienced the place after all. It’s entirely sensible that I be governed by whatever fraction of EU law I submit to, there are aspects of British law I am subject to as well (not that I have any intention of shagging young birds — or likelihood — these days but how young they can be is determined not just by the local age of consent but also by British law, even obeying the local age where I am could still be an offence in British law). But Australian law? Well, you know, fu.. … .
April 19, 2024
Yet another unintended consequence of the Online Harms Act – easier deportation of non-citizens
In The Line, Kevin Wiener explains another of the hidden “gems” of the Trudeau government’s ill-considered and repressive Online Harms Act that at least will please a few anti-immigration activists:
According to the Trudeau government and its defenders, the Online Harms Act is nothing to worry about. This is supposed to be a bill that will protect equity-seeking groups like racial minorities — yet one little-discussed provision will make millions of permanent residents open to deportation for even the most minor criminal offences, as long as a prosecutor can show that the crime was hate-motivated.
The resulting power to turn any crime into a deportable offence will make non-citizens — many of whom are racial and religious minorities — even more vulnerable in the criminal justice system compared to citizens.
The main focus of the Online Harms Act is regulating online platforms, but it also makes major changes to the way the criminal justice system deals with hate-motivated crimes. Under current law, if a crime is motivated by hate based on a protected characteristic, that’s considered an aggravating factor at sentencing. That means the judge can impose a higher sentence than they normally would, although they can never exceed the maximum sentence for the underlying crime. For many minor crimes, that maximum sentence is two years less a day.
The Online Harms Act uses a totally different approach to hate crimes. Rather than just being a sentencing factor, the Act would create a brand-new hate crime offence. Committing any crime, if motivated by hatred, would make someone guilty of a second crime, with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. To counter public concern, the Trudeau government has recently sent one of its senior advisors, Supriya Dwivedi, to argue that critics of this provision are “engaging in bad faith tactics”, going so far as to make the absolutely false statement that the bill won’t allow an increased sentence unless the underlying crime already had that sentence.
That is an accurate description of the current sentencing regime, but the text and clear purpose of the new bill is to let judges go further: a serious aggravated assault that might normally attract the maximum 14-year sentence can lead to life imprisonment if the attack was hate-motivated.
Further, Dwivedi’s defence of the bill ignores that maximum sentences play an important role in Canada’s immigration policy. If someone is neither a citizen nor a permanent resident, they can only be deported if they commit a more serious (called an “indictable”) offence, or two separate less serious (or “summary”) offences.
The new hate crime provision would be an indictable offence.
April 15, 2024
El Salvador’s approach to fighting serious crime draws gasps of horror from NGOs
In Niccolo Soldo‘s weekend collection of links, he devotes some attention to the amazing success of El Salvador’s current government in driving down the murder rate and why it’s causing much pearl-clutching and dives for the fainting couches among the transnational “elites” and their media handmaidens:
Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador
Image via Google Maps.
We are bombarded daily with news of mass/random shootings, subway stabbings, and so on. Many of the perpetrators of these violent acts are repeat offenders who for some reason or another (politics) are allowed to roam the streets and attack innocent bystanders. The effect of these lax policies on law and order is the condition known as “anarcho-tyranny” i.e. where the state permits random acts of violence while offering/permitting no solution/resolution … until it has no option but to try and do so.
In NYC, the National Guard is now patrolling the subway. This is a band-aid solution for a problem that was largely fixed already via the policy known as “stop and frisk”. This policy was deemed “racist”, so it had to end. The price of ending this successful policy was a bit of the ol’ anarcho-tyranny. The conflict between rights and law and order continues unabated for the foreseeable future, at least in the USA.
El Salvador has taken a different approach. Since taking office, President Bukele has arrested some 77,000 gang members, locking them up in prisons throughout the country. In one fell swoop, its notoriously high homicide rate has collapsed. Bukele’s law and order policy has resolved El Salvador’s internal security issue … but at what cost? Western media and human rights NGOs insist that the cost has been El Salvador’s democracy:
Under President Nayib Bukele, El Salvador has experienced one of the most spectacular declines in violent crime in recent memory, anywhere in the world. Despite ranking among the most dangerous countries on the planet a mere decade ago, the Central American state today boasts a homicide rate of only 2.4 per 100,000 people — the lowest of any country in the Western Hemisphere other than Canada.
El Salvador owes much of its dramatic drop in crime to Bukele’s crackdown on street gangs and criminal organizations, including MS-13 and Barrio 18. Although homicide rates were trending downward before Bukele took office in 2019, violent crime declined sharply after March 2022, when his government declared a state of emergency following a spike in murders, allowing the government to suspend basic civil liberties and mobilize the armed forces to carry out mass arrests. This state of exception granted Bukele’s administration a blank check to fight gangs and detain suspects without consideration for transparency, due process, or human rights.
Bukele is wildly popular at home, and his policy is now gaining currency elsewhere in Latin America:
Bukele’s iron-fist measures and their apparent results have not only made him wildly popular in his country — earning him a landslide reelection in February 2024 — but also captured the imagination of politicians elsewhere grappling with rapidly deteriorating public safety. Members of the political elite in other states are now toying with the so-called Bukele model. In Ecuador, for instance, President Daniel Noboa has unabashedly followed in Bukele’s footsteps in response to prison riots and a major surge in homicides, declaring a state of emergency in January that gave the armed forces free rein to detain suspects and to take over control of the country’s prisons. The Bukele-style security measures appear to be succeeding there, as well: a little over a month into the crackdown, the government reported that the daily average of homicides had fallen from 28 to six. The fact that militarized public safety campaigns are proving effective outside El Salvador has only enhanced the model’s growing appeal across Latin America, which has long suffered the highest rate of violence of any region in the world.
Here’s the part where the author lodges his protest, and suggests alternative models:
But as appealing as a Bukele-style crackdown might seem, these punitive campaigns against organized crime come at a serious cost to democracy and human rights. These measures concentrate power in the hands of the executive, chipping away at other democratic institutions, such as Congress and the judiciary, that are critical bulwarks against governmental abuse. They also fail to solve the underlying problems, such as corruption and impunity, that generate such violence and instability in the first place.
There are alternatives to the Bukele model for reducing crime. In cities in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, politicians have managed to decrease homicides without eroding civil and human rights by making sustained investments in democratic policing, which emphasizes transparency, accountability, and civil liberties. These measures may not work as quickly, and they may not be as conspicuous. But they do not sacrifice democracy on the altar of public safety. Militarized states of emergency are no silver bullet: for any public safety measures to permanently succeed, they must not come at the expense of the democratic institutions that protect civilians from abuse at the hands of the government.
El Salvador has traded off some civil liberties for public safety, but to suggest examples from Brazil, Colombia, and especially Mexico as workable alternatives boggles the mind. This isn’t the first essay written about El Salvador that laments its “loss of democracy” … The Economist keeps pumping out this same argument over and over again. What these articles do tell us is that for many, democracy is indeed a god, and being a god, it is infallible. Not only can the openness of liberal democratic societies not be at fault for some of the crime that has plagued these countries, but Bukele’s heavy-handed approach is doomed to failure in the long run because it is not based on democratic principles. These democratic critics of Bukele are engaging faith-based reasoning, because their god cannot fail.
April 14, 2024
More evidence of Canada’s dwindling state capacity – not enough judges
Matt Gurney discussed this issue along with several others in this week’s Line podcast (highly recommended listening/watching, by the way):
Superior Court of Justice building on University Avenue in Toronto (formerly the York County Court House).
An evolving line of defence we see from the federal Liberals is that they’re actually doing a great job. It’s those darned provincial premiers that are screwing things up.
We touched on this in our last dispatch. And you know what? There’s some truth to it. Some, I stress. A lot of issues that are much vexing Canadians today aren’t fully or even primarily in federal jurisdiction. Health care and housing are two obvious examples. Canada is a complicated place, and the Liberals no doubt prefer to not talk about things that they’ve done that have exacerbated challenges faced by other orders of government. But the basic point is fair: Justin Trudeau ain’t to blame for all that ails you. Or at least, the blame ought to be spread around some.
This national disgrace, though, lands squarely on him.
You might have read about the shortage of judges across the country. It’s a pretty niche issue, so you might have missed it. Even if you’ve heard about it, you may not have paid much attention to it. Most Canadians won’t have much contact with the criminal justice system over their lives, let alone make their careers in it. But the crux of the issue is this: appointing judges to provincial superior courts, where many of the most serious matters are heard, is in the federal jurisdiction. Solely. Ditto appointments to the courts of appeal: totally in the federal jurisdiction. And the feds have fallen way behind on filling vacancies and aren’t appointing judges fast enough to erase the backlog. Despite a spate of recent appointments, there are dozens of vacancies across the country. These are funded positions that ought to be filled and overseeing cases. But they aren’t, entirely because the feds haven’t made the necessary appointments. That’s the issue.
A lack of judges is creating bottlenecks in the justice system. Arrests are being made and charges are being laid and cases are being prepared and then … nothing happens. Because you can’t hold a trial if there isn’t a judge available to oversee it.
The Toronto Star‘s Jacques Gallant has established something of a bleak speciality in his recent reporting. He’s written a series of articles in recent months documenting serious criminal cases that are being thrown out of court, with the accused set free, because their trial has been delayed so much that it cannot be completed before the Supreme Court-ordered limit for a “reasonable” wait for a trial runs out. That’s 18 months for more minor issues, and 30 months for serious ones.
To be clear: the decision to throw out the cases is, in a legal sense, correct. Indeed, it’s mandatory. The Supreme Court determined what a hard limit should be, and a case that exceeds that is dead. Full stop. That’s the law of the land. The judges forced to preside over these dismissals are not to blame, and are increasingly venting their frustration in their rulings. They’re mortified, and they’re criticizing the government in unusually blunt terms, to put it mildly. You don’t often read court rulings that come off more like op-eds, but we live in weird times.
But it’s a good thing that they’re saying something. Because these vacancies are having appalling real-world consequences. Gallant wrote recently about a case that I felt would mark the low point in the entire embarrassment. A woman had accused a man of raping her. She did a brave thing and reported it. The police believed her and made an arrest. The Crown reviewed the evidence and believed her, and proceeded with a trial. A jury believed her, and after considering the evidence against the accused and hearing his defence, convicted him of the crime.
And then the judge tossed the case, setting aside the verdict and letting the accused go free, innocent in the eyes of the law. Because the clock had run out.
April 10, 2024
Saving Our Democracy watch – “[Trump] has to do at least ten years, or everybody will hate the navy”
Chris Bray suggests that reading the full linked document may be hazardous to your mental health, so he’s helpfully highlighted a few of the key points that may have you scratching your head and saying something like “The Fuh? What??”
I have a mixed view of Donald Trump’s argument about presidential immunity, which you can read here. But an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court today by retired flag officers and service secretaries is so bizarre that reading it may permanently alter the structure of my face.
You can read the whole amicus brief here, but treat it like a solar eclipse and don’t stare at it directly. As a first sign of how much good faith the thing contains, one of the amici is Michael Hayden.
The first argument is that Trump has to go to prison or else civilians won’t control the military anymore. You think I’m kidding.
“Amici are deeply interested in this case because presidential immunity from criminal prosecution would threaten the military’s role in American society, our nation’s constitutional order, and our national security.” See the connection? If Donald Trump doesn’t go to prison, “the military’s role in American society” will be damaged. He has to do at least ten years, or everybody will hate the navy.
The prevailing feature of the entire brief is an essence of flattening. Every issue is very simple. There are no competing examples. None of this has ever come up before: The brief deals with questions of presidential immunity around Obama drone-killing a 16 year-old US citizen, or Lincoln unilaterally suspending habeas corpus and using the military to arrest critics of the war, by not mentioning any of it, or any other historical example. Everything is a surface. I’ve graded undergraduate essays, so the tone and depth of the effort feels familiar.
Third argument: Donald Trump has to be prosecuted, because America promotes democracy all over the world, and Trump not being prosecuted is against democracy, so it will be harder for us to promote democracy if we don’t prosecute him. Authoritarian regimes say that American democracy doesn’t work, so: “Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution feeds those false and harmful narratives. Unless Petitioner’s theory is rejected, we risk jeopardizing America’s standing as a guardian of democracy in the world and further feeding the spread of authoritarianism, thereby threatening the national security of the United States and democracies around the world.”
We have to imprison the leader of the political opposition, or people won’t think we’re a democracy, and then there will be more authoritarianism, like when regimes imprison the political opposition.
April 8, 2024
Beecher’s Bible: A Sharps 1853 from John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry
Forgotten Weapons
Published Jan 8, 2024On October 16, 1859 John Brown and 19 men left the Kennedy farmhouse and made their way a few miles south to the Harpers Ferry Arsenal. They planned to seize the Arsenal and use its arms — along with 200 Sharps 1853 carbines and 1,000 pikes they had previously purchased — to ignite and arm a slave revolt. Brown was a true fanatic for the abolitionist cause, perfectly willing to spill blood for a just cause. His assault on the Arsenal lasted three days, but failed to incite a rebellion. Instead of attracting local slaves to his banner, he attracted local militia and the US Marines. His force was besieged in the arsenal firehouse, and when the Marines broke through the doors they captured five surviving members of the Brown party, including Brown himself. All five were quickly tried and found guilty of murder, treason, and inciting negroes to riot. They were sentenced to death, and hanged on December 2, 1859.
Most of Brown’s 200 Sharps carbines were left in the farmhouse hideout, to be distributed when the insurrection took hold. These were found by local militia, among them the Independent Greys, and some were kept as souvenirs — including this example.
There is an intriguing historical question as to whether Brown’s raid was ultimately good for the country or not. It was extremely divisive at the time, and it can be argued that the raid was a major factor leading to Lincoln’s election and the Civil War. Could slavery have been abolished without the need for a cataclysmic war if John Brown had not fractured the Democratic Party? To what extent is killing for a cause justifiable? Do the ends always justify the means? John Brown had no doubts about his answers to these questions … but maybe he should have.
(more…)
March 16, 2024
Canadian courts bracing for a “tsunami” of Pretendians
Tristin Hopper on the dawning realization among Canadian provincial courts that they are facing a huge increase in the number of offenders hoping to take advantage of the reduced sentences available to First Nations people:
“The Pretendians”, a CBC documentary – https://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/episodes/the-pretendians
A B.C. judge has warned that a “tsunami” of fake Indigenous people are set to hit the Canadian court system as offenders increasingly claim Indigenous status in a bid to obtain lighter treatment.
“A Tsunami is coming; driven by the desire of non-Indigenous people to get what they perceive to be the benefits of identifying as Indigenous,” B.C. Provincial Court Judge David Patterson said in a decision published this week.
Patterson warned his fellow judges “to be alive to the issue of Indigenous identity fraud” and begin demanding “proof” that offenders are “entitled to be sentenced as an Indigenous person”.
The decision was in regards to a Prince George, B.C., pastor, Nathan Legault, who was convicted of several charges related to the sexual victimization of young girls under his supervision, including a conviction for the making of child pornography.
But before the sentencing, Legault told the court he now self-identified as Métis, and should thus be subject to Gladue Rights — a system wherein judges are required to consider lighter and “alternate” sentences for Indigenous offenders.
First written into the Criminal Code in 1995 and then encoded in the 1999 Supreme Court decision R v. Gladue, these principles were explicitly introduced to reduce rates of Indigenous incarceration by requiring judges to consider “the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders” before applying a legal sanction.
R v. Gladue states specifically that the principle is “not to be taken as a means of automatically reducing the prison sentence of aboriginal offenders”. The decision also says that it’s “unreasonable to assume that aboriginal peoples do not believe in the importance of traditional sentencing goals”.
Nevertheless, lighter sentences and more ready bail are often the effect — to the point where the Gladue process has been criticized by Indigenous women’s groups for favouring Indigenous male offenders at the expense of Indigenous female victims.
March 15, 2024
Toronto’s blue-uniformed surrender monkeys say … just make it easier for criminals and maybe they won’t hurt you
Crime has been increasing lately, and Toronto’s boys, girls, and all 57 other genderbeings in blue have their very best advice for you: surrender now.
… Toronto Police have reflected on the problem. They’ve mulled it over. Thought long and hard. And they’re advising people just give up. To stay safe.
This advice came out at a community safety meeting between Toronto Police officials and concerned citizens last month. (The meeting was covered by City News Toronto, but didn’t get widespread coverage until this week, when clips went viral online. Tell me that isn’t a microcosm of the 21 century.) In remarks to the citizens at the meeting, a Toronto police constable said this: “To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs by your front door. Because they’re breaking into your homes to steal your car. They don’t want anything else. A lot of them that [the police] are arresting have guns on them. And they’re not toy guns. They’re real guns. They’re loaded.”
Oh. Okay.
Look, it’s not bad advice, in any individual circumstance. There probably are a lot of people out there who’d be relieved if someone kicked in their door, grabbed the fob and took off. And it’s certainly not novel advice from a police service. We’ve all heard variations of this before, right? “Just give up your wallet” when you’re mugged. “Just get out of the car” during a carjacking. You can always replace things. Right?
The problem is that, in the other scenarios above, you’re out and about in public. There’s no guarantee of safety in public, as much as we all wish otherwise. The advice now being given by Toronto police isn’t what to do when someone jabs a gun into your ribs in a seedy back alley, but how to avoid being harmed by bad guys in your own home. And the police advice is “Make it so easy on them that they have no reason to hurt you”.
There’s no charitable read on this, and in this case, truth isn’t a defence. I accept that the police are giving their real, best, true advice. I accept that they are being sincere. That’s the problem: the police are sincerely surrendering. They’ve given up, and they think it would be best if you gave up, too. These violent robberies are just going to continue, and it’s on us — the public — to minimize the bloodshed and risk to ourselves by … submitting.
I try to avoid hyperbole in columns, with the odd exception for comic effect. But this isn’t funny at all, so I won’t make a joke of it. Let’s be extremely serious for a moment. If this is where the Toronto Police Service has landed in terms of their best advice for the public, as a member of that public and Toronto resident, I’d like to ask this: why stop with leaving my fob by the front door? I have a laptop computer. It’s a few years old now, but still in workable condition. It’s worth a few hundred bucks. Maybe I should leave that by the door, too? I don’t keep a lot of cash on hand — who the hell does, in 2024? — but there’s usually a few bucks in my wallet, or my wife’s. Should part of our nightly routine now just be emptying our wallets into a little bowl that we can leave on the radiator by the front door, and come morning, if the door hasn’t been kicked down and the cash grabbed, we can just put the money right back into our wallets as we get the day started? I’m not really a jewelry guy, but my wedding band is worth something, I guess. Pop that into the bowl with the cash?
After all, the bad guys have guns. Real guns. Loaded guns. And there is apparently nothing to be done about this except submit and co-operate. So say the police.
<sarc>No, that can’t be right. Justin Trudeau made guns illegal, so the bad guys just can’t have guns. It would be against the law, and they might get in trouble.</sarc> Oh, and should the propitiatory offerings be placed inside or outside the door? I guess outside, to make it even easier for them, but make sure everything is protected from rain or snow … it’d be risky if they had to pick everything up soaking wet and they might take it out on you and your family.
That’s Matt Gurney from The Line, so you really should read the whole thing.
