Quotulatiousness

March 3, 2024

From bank robbery to church burning to welfare state collapse

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kulak talks about an old Canadian TV show episode and how the lessons learned could be (and arguably are already being) used to undermine any western welfare state:

In a show that had helicopter escapes, motorcycle chases, modded out James Bond spy cars, teenage money forgers, veteran jewel thieves, super hackers, aviation engineer super smugglers … This one stood out for its nigh stupid simplicity.

He treated bank robbery as a literal door to door business.

Gilbert Galvan’s great innovation wasn’t any innovation, it was stripping bank robbery itself down to its barest essentials. And then repeating it at scale. To the point where he could rob one bank, and then rob the bank across the street whilst police were still in the first investigating (literally! this was how they found out he existed).

He’d line up with the rest of the customers, wait his turn, approach the teller, and then quietly show her his pistol before demanding the money, and WALKING out the front door of the bank, the person behind him in line never knowing that the robbery had even happened.

The limitation was of course he never hit the safe, and only got one teller’s worth of cash, about 5-20k per robbery (1980s dollars, so double or triple modern dollars), but wearing elaborate theatrical disguises for every heist the chance of of him ever being tracked down were effectively Zero. And needing only one man, there was no accomplice to rat him out.

He carried out FIFTY heists this way, and to this day this remains the greatest lesson I’ve learned from the show… The devastating effect of simple marginally effective things, done at scale. It’s certainly served me well marketing this blog.

Now apply this lesson to the modern Cradle to Grave Total State

Since the Trudeau government funded media started promoting a blood libel against Christian church run Residential schools, falsely alleging ground penetrating radar had found “mass graves” at the site of the schools from the first half of the 20th century, over 100 churches have been attacked or burned in Canada.

Whilst the first few fires were probably set by the same person in British Columbia, once it became a national story with political valence disaffected copycats quickly sprung up around the nation. There is basically a zero percent chance the vandals on one end of the country know or have ever met the vandals on the other side. And basically no way that catching even one group of vandals or arsonists would stop the attacks.

Now I would like you to imagine the implications for civil strife in the US, and western welfare states, when this starts happening to government offices or schools which get embroiled in LGBTQ or Childhood transition scandals.

Remember that the average public elementary or high school has 1000+ students in it, the bottom 10-20% of whom absolutely despise the place. People always wonder at how many mass shootings there are in the US, I’m always shocked at how few there are. there are 40,000 suicides a year in the US, and while the numbers are hard to grab at least 10,000 of those are youth suicides. That so few decide to take classmates with them always struck me as bizarre, given human beings have killed 100s of millions of each other in the past 100 years, but then isn’t it also interesting the number of mass shootings has risen so rapidly since Columbine and the media cycle popularization of it public conciousness?

Likewise half a million Americans are treated for self inflicted injury every year, of which over 100k are Youth, and 424,000 youth are arrested on some crime or other every year.

I’m going to call it right now:

In the next 5 years someone out there, might be in America, might be Europe, is going to start burning down schools for some ideological reason, we might never even know why if they are never caught.

And At that point copycat school burnings will become one of the most dramatic and prominent trends in western life as it’s quickly copied around the western world. In the past 3 years of those 100 Canadian churches vandalized, 33 burnt right to the ground (10 per year). If you assumed the same number with no boost from all the students/parents who despise their school or maybe even feel mortal danger from them, that’d still be (population adjusted) something like 100 schools per year burning in America, probably til the end of time. Assuming those government buildings have the usual ludicrous construction costs of 20ish million … that’d be about 2 billion dollars per year in lost buildings, which lets be honest probably won’t get replaced in a timely manner.

There are 97,500 public schools in America, assuming just that Canadian Church burning rate of attacks that’d be more than 1% of American public schools gone in a decade.

March 1, 2024

Women behaving badly on [police bodycam] video

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Janice Fiamengo suggests that demands to the use of police bodycam footage involving young women being arrested for criminal behaviour is a weird bit of official white-knighting on the part of the authorities:

Moments of public outrage can be opportunities to consider deep-rooted cultural assumptions.

There’s been moral outrage lately over a popular YouTube channel called Drive Thru Tours. Launched in 2020, the channel started out by posting videos of tours through parts of New Jersey and New York. It hit paydirt last year when it began showing videos of police arrests, with titles such as “Rude 19-year-old Girl Arrested for DUI in Pullman, WA” (recommended if you want to get a flavor of the site) and “Belligerent Woman Arrested for DWI after Police Pursuit and Taken to Jail” (not recommended — very disturbing). The channel owner obtained the content — which until recently has focused exclusively on female offenders — from police bodycam recordings, now publicly available through freedom of information requests.

Bodycam footage was originally made accessible to the public so that American citizens can hold police accountable for their actions. Scrutiny of police behavior is widely considered a public good. Scrutiny of female behavior, however, is quite a different story — as responses to the channel demonstrate.

According to a small flurry of recent news reports, New Jersey police are warning that Drive Thru Tours is harming “vulnerable” young women by posting the evidence of their arrests. The bodycam footage was never intended, they protest, for such a purpose. In consequence, the Association of Chiefs of Police of New Jersey is calling for legislation against what they are describing as “online sexual predators“, and lawmakers in that state are considering a bill that would prohibit publishing the footage except within narrow parameters, including with the written consent of the subject.

Quite apart from whether such a bill is a good idea or not (I favor public access but have not given the matter serious thought), the language used in the articles is remarkable for its gynocentric sentimentality and misplaced sympathy.

One of the most vocal on the subject is Montville, New Jersey Police Chief Andrew Caggiano, who is quoted as stating that “It was never the intent of OPRA [the Open Public Records Act] to create such a platform that preys on young women and takes advantage of them at a time when they are vulnerable”. He also expressed a personal repugnance: “As a law enforcement professional and the father of three daughters, I am sickened by the fact that people are abusing OPRA to post these types of videos on social media sites”.

Given that it is not (yet) illegal to use bodycam material in the manner described, Chief Caggiano’s dramatic reaction seems overstated. One wonders in what sense the reckless and self-absorbed young people shown in these videos are “vulnerable”. Wouldn’t such language be better suited to their victims? Perhaps Caggiano knows something about his daughters that we don’t know (there is a video in which a “Cop’s Daughter Gets Arrested for DWI after Fleeing Accident Scene”): one would not normally expect a chief of police to so quickly substitute in imagination his own daughters for the inebriated and flagrantly dishonest women shown on Drive Thru Tours.

Caggiano’s bluster is, of course, all too familiar in a culture that cannot bear to hold women fully responsible for their bad actions — no matter how anti-social or potentially lethal — and must habitually frame them as innocent victims. It’s impossible to imagine such outraged sympathy being expressed for any male offenders in similar situations.

February 11, 2024

Charlie Angus, Canada’s one-man campaign for struggle sessions, re-education, and prison for people who say things he doesn’t like

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper imagines the inside thoughts of NDP MP Charlie Angus, who introduced a Private Member’s Bill this week to criminalize speech that even hints at not being fully onboard with Team Climate Catastrophe, especially anything supporting the use of fossil fuels:

“Charlie Angus at convention 2023 2 (cropped)” by DrOwl19 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Monday
It’s an odd thing to work in the House of Commons; a place where the country’s most cynical, power-mad misanthropes are gathered together into one distilled mass of treachery.

This is why I aligned myself with the only true bastion of moral rectitude in this wretched, faithless town. The NDP does not court power, and thus remains untainted by it. Only by insulating ourselves against the corrupting lure of ambition can we truly know we are on the right side of history.

And today, more than ever, I know the only true moral course is to introduce a federal program of jailing any Canadian who expresses positive opinions of a non-renewable fuel source. Not every Canadian, mind you, just those who can’t provide evidence that an oil company doesn’t indirectly benefit them in some way.

Tuesday
As predicted, the usual agents of disinformation have libelled my bill as “illiberal” or “fascistic”. We’ll prescribe appropriate criminal consequences for this kind of mendacity in due course, but for now I would only ask these deceit-merchants to consider what we’re up against.

Oil companies are, quite literally, the knowing architects of the complete destruction of the human race. If the so-called “market” had been left to its own devices, the world would currently be a utopia of bottomless green energy. But instead, the oil and gas industry has tricked humanity into believing that fossil fuels are bringers of anything except slavery.

Against this kind of perfidy, I was forced to devise legislation that was broad enough to eliminate any conceivable loophole. If we banned pro-oil commercials, they would simply pour their advertising dollars into billboards. If we banned billboards, they would start embedding secret pro-gasoline messages in popular music. If we banned that, they would train armies of crows to attack e-cyclists while cawing the words “Suncor” and “pipelines”.

And you know what they would say when I tabled a bill to ban the attack crows? They would call it “illiberal”.

February 2, 2024

Perhaps something for Wodehouse fans who want a bit more sex and violence in their fiction

Filed under: Books, Britain, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Conservative Woman, Alan Ashworth recommends a book by one of P.G. Wodehouse’s disciples, but only for those who are ready for Plum-like wit with “lashings of sex, violence, murder and drunkenness”:

If, like me, you have read every line of PG Wodehouse’s 90-odd books – at least half a dozen times each in the case of the Jeeves novels – your attention might be piqued, if piqued is the word I seek, by one of the Master’s disciples. His name is Kyril Bonfiglioli.

In a trilogy about an art dealer named Charlie Mortdecai based loosely on himself, Bonfiglioli, or Bon as his friends and enemies called him, combines a Woosterish turn of phrase with lashings of sex, violence, murder and drunkenness. Mortdecai is snobbish, greedy, lustful, unscrupulous, untrustworthy, gloriously politically incorrect and hilarious to boot.

The first book, Don’t Point That Thing At Me, was published in 1973, two years before Wodehouse died. In a short foreword, Bon writes: “This is not an autobiographical novel: it is about some other portly, dissolute, immoral and middle-aged art dealer.”

The action begins with Mortdecai in his Mayfair mansion burning a gilt picture frame in the fireplace. He, of course, has a sidekick whose name begins with J but Jock has little in common with Bertie Wooster’s loyal manservant. As Bon puts it, “Jock is a sort of anti-Jeeves; silent, resourceful, respectful even, when the mood takes him, but sort of drunk all the time, really, and fond of smashing people’s faces in. You can’t run a fine-arts business these days without a thug and Jock is one of the best in the trade … his idea of a civil smile is rolling back part of his upper lip from a long, yellow dogtooth. It frightens me.

“Having introduced Jock – his surname escapes me, I should think it would be his mother’s – I suppose I had better give a few facts about myself. I am in the prime of life, if that tells you anything, of barely average height, of sadly over-average weight and am possessed of the intriguing remains of rather flashy good looks. (Sometimes, in a subdued light and with my tummy tucked in, I could almost fancy me myself.) I like art and money and dirty jokes and drink. I am very successful. I discovered at my goodish second-rate public school that almost anyone can win a fight if he is prepared to put his thumb into the other fellow’s eye.”

Charlie is receiving a visit from a fat policeman named Martland who suspects him, correctly, of involvement in the theft of a Goya from Madrid five days earlier.

“Somewhere in the trash he reads, Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun. In he pranced, all silent and catlike and absurd, buttocks swaying noiselessly. ‘Don’t get up,’ he sneered, when he saw that I had no intention of doing so. ‘I’ll help myself, shall I?’

“Ignoring the more inviting bottles on the drinks tray, he unerringly snared the great Rodney decanter from underneath and poured himself a gross amount of what he thought would be my Taylor ’31. A score to me already, for I had filled it with Invalid Port of an unbelievable nastiness. He didn’t notice: score two to me. Of course he is only a policeman.”

Martland features heavily in the ensuing romp, which involves several murders, a journey across America in a Rolls-Royce, a nymphomaniac millionairess and a remote cave near Silverdale, Lancashire.

January 2, 2024

Vugrek’s Cell Phone Gun for Organized Crime

Filed under: Europe, History, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Sept 2023

The Vugrek family of Croatia (Marko Sr, Marko Jr, and Ivan) were talented firearms designers, who ended up supplying organized crime. Their best-known development was the Agram 2000 submachine gun, a very well-built weapon submitted to Croatian military trials in the early 1990s. In the wake of prosecution for making the Agram illicitly after its military rejection, Marko Vugrek developed a number of guns specifically for illicit use, including this well-done cell phone gun. They began to turn up in the Balkans and throughout Europe around 2007, and investigations traced them back to their Croatian creator.

A big thanks to the Croatian Police Museum (Muzej Policije) in Zagreb for giving me access to film this rare piece for you! Check them out at: https://muzej-policije.gov.hr
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December 28, 2023

“Lich and Barber … now hold the record for the longest “mischief” trial in Canadian history”

“Autonomous Truck(er)s” describes the “Lawfare Archipelago” as Justin Trudeau’s government persecutes Tamara Lich and Chris Barber for their part in organizing the Freedom Convoy movement in 2022:

It has been almost two years since Canada’s Freedom Convoy took the country, and the world, by storm. In what has been hailed around the globe as the most popular protest anywhere against the international Covid Regime, represented in Canada by the venal and vindictive Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Truckers of the Freedom Convoy still occupy a place as heroes to millions.

Everyone remembers how the Freedom Convoy was crushed by Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Measures Act, and how bank accounts were frozen, credit cards, insurance, the entire financial lives of hundreds of people that were completely shut down. The police crackdown on peaceful protesters, smashing of windows and other vandalism committed against the protesters vehicles, trampling people with horses, the beatings, the arrests; an overwhelmingly disproportionate and wholly unnecessary asymmetric response.

In December of 2023, however, a number of those truckers and their supporters are still facing adversity and punishment, including potential jail time, with ongoing court cases, and in the situation with The Coutts 4, a trial which hasn’t even started yet.

These cases are illustrative of the corruption of the Canadian political system, the media, the courts and ‘justice system’, and the subversion of some of the founding pillars of western civilization.

Canada is no longer a free country by any stretch of the imagination.


Part 1 : Tamara Lich and Chris Barber

On Thursday, November 30, just a few weeks ago, I traveled to Ottawa to take part in an interview for a documentary film being made by former CBC journalist and now freelance podcaster Trish Wood, whose working title is The Trials of Tamara Lich. Trish had stumbled upon my writings and podcasts here at Substack, and invited me on her show to discuss the situation with the Coutts men being held as political prisoners. Impressed with my work on that, as well as my history in trucking and perspectives on the deeper meaning behind the Freedom Convoy, she wanted me to appear in this documentary; I was honored to be asked and happy to oblige.

As of this writing, the trial is on Christmas break, and may, possibly resume in March 2024. It should be noted that for the primary charges that Lich and Barber are facing, in their roles as organizers of the Ottawa portion of The Convoy, a 100% peaceful protest whose only acts of violence or property damage came at the hands of the police, they now hold the record for the longest ‘mischief’ trial in Canadian history.

Given the actions of our government, perhaps it is they who should be the accused.

Chris “Big Red” Barber, a trucker from Saskatchewan who specializes in hauling oversize agricultural equipment, became one of the faces of the Freedom Convoy through his frequent TikTok videos, sharing news about the protest to his many followers online.

It is these TikTok videos that appear to be the bulk of the evidence the Crown has against Mr Barber, though sharing information on a publicly available platform seems the kind of “crime” one would expect to be prosecuted in the country where TikTok is headquartered, The People’s “Republic” of China. The basic dictatorship, we should recall, that is “admired” by Prime Minister Trudeau.

Quelle surprise, coming from Cuba’s most infamous son.

The deeply unsurprising lack of evidence on the part of the Crown is one reason why this case continues nearly two years later; Trudeau, and the Laurentian Elite by whom he was groomed for glory, cannot accept that they went way out over their skis in the gross mismanagement of Covid, and their utterly disgusting treatment of the Freedom Convoy.

An example must be made of Barber and Lich, who are both facing ten years in prison should the Crown get the convictions they desire. “Copping a Tenner”, as they used to call a trip to one of Stalin’s Gulag Camps, is quite a cost to satiate Trudeau’s latent authoritarian proclivities and his narcissistic vanity. One wonders if this is not also an effort to prove to his real constituency, the forces of global corporatism and control exemplified by WEF leader Klaus Schwab, that Trudeau will preserve the image of the brand.

December 26, 2023

Arson as a Christmas Tradition: The Gävle Goat

Filed under: Europe — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Scott
Published 28 Nov 2016

In Gävle, Sweden, every year they build Gävlebocken, an enormous traditional Swedish Christmas straw goat. And every year, someone tries to burn it down. Here’s to holiday traditions.
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December 8, 2023

QotD: Prices as information

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Price = information, gang. Adam Smith said that any item’s real value is what its purchaser is willing to pay, and this is exactly the kind of thing he was talking about.

Let’s all take another huge toke and return to our Libertarian paradise, where all conceivable information is both completely accurate and totally free to circulate. And since we’re now all so very, very mellow, let’s give Karl Marx due credit. One of his main gripes with “capitalism” is that it “commodifies” everything. Everything has its price under “capitalism”, Marx said, even stuff that shouldn’t – human life, human dignity. Since this is a college classroom and I’m the prof, I can assign some homework. Go google up “kid killed over sneakers”. You can always find stories like that. Put your natural, in-many-ways-admirable young person’s urge to rationalize aside, and simply consider the information. What were those Air Jordans really worth, based on the stuff we’ve learned today?

See what I mean? Marx had a point. What are those sneakers worth, considered from the standpoint of “demand”? Obviously more than whatever a human life is worth, considered from the same standpoint. Hence Marxism’s enduring appeal to young people whose hearts are in the right place. “Commodificiation”, or “reification” as he sometimes called it, is very real, and very nasty …

Severian, “Velocity of Information (I)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-26.

December 5, 2023

“Why should a criminal act be punished more or less severely depending on a victim’s ability to emote in public about it?”

Filed under: Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo with a column that, had it been written by a man, would merit universal condemnation from the mainstream media (instead, if they pay any attention to it will probably dismiss it with hints of “false consciousness” or “Stockholm syndrome”):

For years, activists told us that part of the horror for sexual assault survivors was the fear of not being believed, the feeling that one was alone with an experience no one else understood or even acknowledged. Fair enough. Now, decades into the near-constant discussion of all varieties of such assault, many quite trivial yet treated with great seriousness, women don’t seem to have become any better at dealing with the ostensible horror — quite the opposite. The unending focus on sexual victimization seems only to have created more victims.

A case in point involves the infamous sexual crimes of Dr. Vincent Nadon, a now-disgraced GP at the University of Ottawa Health Clinic, who in late 2018 was sentenced to eight years in prison after he pled guilty to many dozens of counts of voyeurism and sexual assault during a 28-year medical practice. (The exact number of charges was hard to determine, seeming to change in every report). Much of what Nadon pled guilty to — mainly the recording of women via his cellphone while they were undressing or undergoing breast exams — was a type of deeply unprofessional conduct that might have gone forever unnoticed by the victims if one intrepid woman had not seen the cellphone’s recording light winking at her from a cabinet and gone to investigate. There were also allegations of sexual assault nearly indistinguishable in their details from regular medical touching — the main distinction being that the touching was “for sexual purposes”. Witnesses at Nadon’s sentencing hearing spoke of what had occurred, in some cases many years previously, as if it had been the worst possible betrayal.

A report of the sentencing hearing described women wiping away tears as they told of “feelings of powerlessness, embarrassment and even guilt”. Others said they had become distrustful of men after learning of Nadon’s actions. One woman, having been shown by police a cellphone recording made of her in Nadon’s office, claimed that she felt physically ill and “has not been able to go to another doctor, and is uncomfortable undressing, even in front of her husband”. Another woman said she felt “violated and betrayed”, and now “looks for hidden cameras everywhere, is obsessed with locking doors, and has developed a medical condition that can be caused by stress”. Many alleged that they feared seeing videos of themselves on the internet though there is no indication Nadon ever uploaded any of his recordings.

In a separate report about fallout from the charges against Nadon, some women expressed outrage at authorities they saw as complicit in their victimization, with one woman complaining that University of Ottawa Health Services failed to “help [her] tell [her] story and come forward”. This woman, who told how she had not been provided with a gown to wear during a pap smear procedure with Nadon, was also furious at the University of Ottawa for failing to more closely monitor its health service provider. Her anger was sustained and wide-ranging: “Obviously I’m super traumatized. I feel extremely violated and so sick to my stomach. It’s really, really disgusting.” “It’s even hard for me now to find a therapist I can trust.”

I can’t get inside these women’s heads, of course, but their statements seem hysterical and irrational, far in excess of the facts, and perhaps willfully exaggerated in order to garner the maximum of attention and sympathy. It was disturbing to see such statements presented as if they proved something about the severity of Dr. Nadon’s actions. They prove nothing except the climate of alleged female sexual fragility in which we are all now forced to live.

Victim impact statements are often of dubious value in criminal justice proceedings — why should a criminal act be punished more or less severely depending on a victim’s ability to emote in public about it? — but in a case like this, with damsel-in-distress melodrama having already been stoked by multiple media reports at every stage of the investigation, the victim statements took on a particularly staged, formulaic quality. One had to make an effort to remember that many of the complainants would not even have known they were harmed if police hadn’t shown them that they were. Their pain may have been real, but it was also almost entirely self-generated.

The whole story of Dr. Nadon the beloved physician turned super-predator seems to have been largely manufactured, first and foremost by police, who were so eager to find as many complainants as possible that they repeatedly put out calls through the media for more “victims” to come forward. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, with police stating publicly that they feared there were likely more victims, and issuing “a public plea for help”. What did they expect to happen?

November 25, 2023

“It’s not called the gender empathy gap for nothing”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo on the blatant disregard for violence as long at that violence is not directed at women:

The news headline by the CBC, Canada’s state-funded broadcaster, could hardly have been more blatant: “Ottawa had 16 homicides in 2022—and nearly half of the victims were women or girls“. In other words, more than half of the victims, as is always the case, were boys and men, a state of affairs that no one at the CBC has ever found troubling enough to lament or even notice. Only when the female homicide rate approaches gender parity in one (unusual) year is it a “collective crisis”, as the subheading alleges.

It’s not called the gender empathy gap for nothing.

[Author’s note: Perhaps I should have stopped here. What more is there to say about the extraordinary indifference of most people, men and women, to violence against men and the craven desire to deny female culpability? There’s nothing new in this essay, no new angle or stats, no rousing call to action, nothing beyond the marshalling of dreary evidence and sadly sarcastic observations unlikely to change any mind or cause any gynocentric cheek to blush. I had intended to finish it in time for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Men, on November 18, but was stymied partly by a sense of helpless anger, the weight of which pressed down on every sentence. The section at the end, about the death of Benjamin Rain, was the last straw.]

Feminists have long touted their concern for victims, yet that is never in shorter supply than in their one-sided discussions of violence, in which the only deaths allowed to matter are female deaths, presented for readers’ contemplation with poignant circumstances, names, and expressions of horrified sadness, as in the above-mentioned article. Dead men remain largely anonymous, and few readers could guess from the typical reports of feminist organizations that women are ever lethally violent.

Indifference to male suffering and death are the norm all over the world, of course, but the Anglophone feminist movement has markedly increased it, fudging numbers and manipulating language to focus empathy exclusively on women and girls. The CBC article devotes significant space to discussing the risible concept of femicide, a relatively recent coinage that makes no secret of its female supremacism, purporting to highlight how women and girls are killed “simply for being women” and “primarily by […] men”, as if every woman, even one killed by accident (as we’ll see), is evidence of gender bias.

The idea that women are killed because they are women is preposterous, impossible to support with evidence, and obviously intended to solidify the impression that women outnumber men as victims of murderous violence. An organization called the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability provides an elaborate taxonomy of forms of femicide to drive the idea home, deliberately blurring the lines between intimate partner homicide, a favored focus, and other killings of women, which are collectively deplored as “brazen acts of hatred“.

Even a cursory reading of the details, however, exposes the vacuousness of the terminology as well as the sleight of hand by which men’s alleged misogyny is misleadingly linked to the totality of the women’s deaths. Only two of Ottawa’s seven murdered women were killed by current or former intimate partners. One of the dead women was attacked and killed by her two adult daughters (an act called “non-intimate femicide”), while another was the victim of a stray bullet that killed her by accident and was probably intended for a man (if you can believe it, the Canadian Femicide Observatory calls this type of death “associated/connected femicide”).

It is impossible to conclude that all or even most of these — certainly unfortunate — deaths can logically be said to have occurred, as the mantra holds, “due to the existence of gender norms and stereotypes, discrimination directed toward women and girls, and unequal power relations across genders“. The determination to find gender discrimination at the root of all female suffering — and thus to justify yet more programs, initiatives, and taxpayer dollars for feminist organizations, as well as more collective shaming of men — seems unstoppable.

November 8, 2023

Reality will continue to be real long after you can keep on denying it

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

But, as Chris Bray illustrates, some people have truly heroic reality-denial complexes going on and they want you to deny reality along with them:

Hey, look, it’s the zeitgeist.

No one knows what to do. About this:

    Court records show the man who pushed Whitcomb currently faces charges ranging from harassment and menacing to assault and illegal possession of a knife. He has also been accused of groping and assaulting women on the north side of the neighborhood and is on the state’s sex offender registry for forcible touching and sexual abuse convictions in 2017 and 2021.

He hurts people a lot, and he’s a registered sex offender, and he sometimes carries a knife, and he walks up to strangers on the street and just hurts them for no reason, and he especially likes to hurt women quite a lot, especially in ways that seem pretty consistently sexual. It’s … complicated. Hard to know what to do!

Note that the story takes care to avoid identifying the person the story is about, because the reporter is concerned that identifying the serial aggressor will make it possible for someone to hurt him: “Gothamist has chosen to withhold the man’s name because of his mental illness and because he is at risk of additional attacks by people who want to take matters into their own hands”. And hurting people is wrong. To prevent attacks, see, you don’t tell people the name of a person who keeps … attacking.

The story warns that the constant aggression of [unnamed person] is a warning about “the systemic failures that allow people to fall through the cracks,” because what a man hurting people over and over again shows us is that the man who’s being forced to hurt all those people by society’s deep cruelty isn’t getting enough services. Greenpoint, an increasingly expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn, is represented by “some of the city’s most progressive lawmakers”, but they’re still struggling with these hard questions. America in 2023, ladies and gentlemen.

But finally, as a test of the reporter’s good faith, we get a broader description that contextualizes the problem. There are a lot of people in New York City who are being forced to hurt other people because they aren’t being given enough services, and here comes a famous example: “Earlier this year, Daniel Penny fatally choked Jordan Neely, a beloved Michael Jackson impersonator who Penny said was ‘going crazy’ and acting aggressively toward fellow subway riders.”

That’s it — that’s the whole description. Who was Jordan Neely? He was a man who impersonated Michael Jackson, and he was loved a whole lot, but then for some unaccountable reason Daniel Penny claimed the beloved man was going crazy, so he just suddenly killed the poor man. It’s strange that this Penny person would say something like that, right?

Now, in a city of eight million people, Jordan Neely was on a list, kept by the city government, of the fifty homeless people whose behavior is most persistently troubling. His case was regularly monitored by the “Coordinated Behavioral Health Task Force”, which “consists of workers from across city government, including the departments of Health, Homeless Services and Hospitals, along with representatives of the nonprofits that the city contracts with to try to connect homeless people to shelter and services, a process known as outreach”. At the time when the mean Daniel Penny suddenly killed him for no reason, Neely had an active arrest warrant. And other passengers in the subway car said that — well, let’s turn to the headline in the New York Times: “Witnesses in Subway Chokehold Case Describe Fears of Death and Violence“.

October 16, 2023

The Allied Rape Wave of 1944 – War Against Humanity 116

World War Two
Published 12 Oct 2023

Since the earliest days of humanity, where there has been war, there has been rape. This war is no different. As vast armies battle across Europe, the chaos in their wake breeds an epidemic of rape. In its action and its punishment the European rape wave is also highly racialised. It adds up to a storm of suffering.
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October 8, 2023

Can we get back to de mortuis nil nisi bonum any time soon?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Latin phrase refers to speaking nothing but good of the (recently) deceased, but as partisan passions rise, the urge to wave the bloody shirt and denigrate the dead overwhelms decency and common sense:

Of all the vices that can contribute to the collapse of civil society, a special place of honor surely needs to be reserved for mocking the newly murdered.

I don’t mean mocking the newly dead. The somewhat mawkish view that no ill should be spoken of the recently departed has always seemed rather priggish to me. It would, in fact, be absurd if we decided that in the wake of, say, Mitch McConnell’s or Noam Chomsky’s death, we couldn’t criticize their lives, careers, and beliefs. “If they’d given him an enema, they could have buried him in a matchbox” was my old friend Christopher Hitchens’ comment on the passing of Jerry Falwell. Rude, surely. Too soon, sure. But a swipe, not a gloat. And on Fox News. To Ralph Reed.

What crosses the line of what Orwell prized as “common decency” is using the occasion of someone’s untimely death to say they deserved it. “The homosexuals have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution” was Pat Buchanan’s charming response to the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. In the same vein today, on the other side as it were, there’s a “Herman Cain Award” subreddit with half a million members, devoted to naming and mocking vaccine skeptics who subsequently died of Covid. A giant, unified chorus of “ha-ha”s across the decades.

Social media and CCTV cameras have made the schadenfreude more visceral. This past week, a young “social justice” activist, Ryan Carson, was knifed to death on the street by a deranged 18-year-old assailant, as Carson’s girlfriend, paralyzed with shock, looked on. We might once have just heard of or read about this attack. Now we see it as it happens. Its reach might once have been limited by media gatekeepers. Now it can reach millions in a matter of hours on social media. And if you’re Elon Musk and your strategy for Twitter is to make it a more visual, visceral, sticky site, it’s gold. Within hours of Carson’s death, his last, terrifying moments were accessible to millions: a snuff video in all but name, now available to be monetized by gawkers.

And indecent gawkers. “It’s good to make fun of people who support criminals when they get murdered by criminals,” commented one on Twitter. “Ryan Carson took the phrase ‘bleeding heart liberal’ way too literally,” said another. (Carson’s actual heart was pierced by the murder weapon.) Other virtual tricoteuses went after the traumatized bystander: “Ryan Carson’s girlfriend is the Douche of the Week. 1. Showed almost no concern as her guy was murdered. 2. Expressed zero concern as he lay on the ground dying. Didn’t even bend down. 3. Refused to give police the murderer’s description. Soulless Marxist.” Another: “WHAT??? Ryan Carson’s girlfriend … started a GoFundMe page to make money off his death. I would tell her to eat trash but that’s cannibalism.” Or this: “She didn’t react when he was stabbed but she sure didn’t hesitate to raise $50k on go fund me. Makes you wonder.”

Makes you wonder what exactly? Twitter reminds me of Trump: you can’t believe it can go lower — until it always does.

I should stipulate, I suppose, that I doubt I would have been one of Ryan Carson’s favorite writers. His views on crime and policing were, to my mind, hopelessly naive and deeply counter-productive for real social justice. He also once tweeted upon news of Rush Limbaugh’s death — “lmao hell yeah” — and called himself, presumably with a wink, “COO of Antifa.” But many of us have lost our moral bearings in this cold civil war. And Carson was a human being, son of a mother and father, murdered senselessly, traumatizing a whole host of others. In that context, nothing else matters but his humanity. Lambaste his views; but don’t delight in his death even as millions can see his final, deeply vulnerable moments of panic and fear.

The same should be said to the online trolls who went after Josh Kruger, a lefty Philly journalist (and Dish reader) killed in his home this week, and Pava LaPere, a BLM-touting entrepreneur in Baltimore murdered brutally the week before. (I’ll spare you the Twitter comments.) The impulse to use anything to advance a narrative: this is how far we’ve sunk into bitter, vicious tribalism.

And is it me or is Musk’s Twitter obviously making all this worse, putting out more and more videos of street crime, bar fights, robberies, and brawls, often with racial tension fueling them? In our collective psyche there is the problem of mentally ill people committing crimes on the streets, and there is also the problem of everyone constantly seeing videos of mentally ill people committing crimes on the streets. It distorts our judgment; it privileges the vivid and violent over the lucid and peaceful. It normalizes and numbs us to violence and can incentivize it. And this emotive tribal priming makes us more likely to react to the deaths of our political opponents with glee.

October 7, 2023

“Many people who hold ‘luxury beliefs’ … are oblivious to the consequences of their views”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Rob Henderson, guest-posting at The Free Press, illustrates several recent examples of well-connected people holding what he coined as “luxury beliefs” being suddenly introduced to the real-world consequences of their beliefs:

Recently, two high-profile supporters of “justice reform” were murdered.

At 4 a.m. on Monday, Ryan Carson, a 32-year-old social justice and climate change activist, was walking with his girlfriend in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, when he was stabbed to death by a stranger. Only a few hours earlier in Philadelphia, activist and journalist Josh Kruger was shot and killed in his home.

And two Democratic lawmakers who voted to “redirect funding to community-based policing reforms” have been recent victims of violent crime.

On Monday night, blocks away from the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked by three armed men. (The lawmaker survived the incident unscathed.) In February, Angie Craig was attacked in an elevator at her apartment building in Capitol Hill. A homeless man demanded she allow him into her home to use the restroom, then he punched her and grabbed her around the neck. She escaped after throwing hot coffee on him.

Of course, these people did not deserve harm because of their support for soft-on-crime policies. But I’ve long argued that many people who hold “luxury beliefs” — ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes — are oblivious to the consequences of their views. Support for defunding the police is a classic example.

Luxury beliefs can stem from malice, good intentions, or outright naivete.

But the individuals who hold those beliefs, the people who wield the most influence in policy and culture, are often sheltered when their preferences are implemented.

Some online commenters have said that my luxury beliefs thesis is undermined by these tragic events, because the victims were affluent and influential — and they still suffered the consequences of their beliefs.

But the fact remains that poor people are far more likely to be victims of violent crime. For every upper-middle-class person killed, 20 poor people you never hear about are assaulted and murdered. You just never hear about them. They don’t get identified by name in the media. Their stories don’t get told.

October 5, 2023

“Canada, where truck drivers are Nazis and Nazis are war heroes”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Donna LaFramboise on the “Coutts Four” — bona fide political prisoners of the Canadian state:

Gord Magill has a lengthy article over at Newsweek titled Meet the Four Men Being Held as Political Prisoners in Canada. These individuals are jointly accused of conspiring to murder police officers during a protest in Coutts, Alberta around the same time that the Freedom Convoy truckers were in Ottawa.

That’s a very serious charge, of course, but evidence appears scarce. I’ve not personally investigated this matter, but a former Toronto police detective named Donald Best has. In July, he outlined a long list of concerns, in addition to pointing out that “Everybody makes bail in Canada” — including the man “currently accused of the first degree murder of Toronto Police officer Jeffrey Northrup”.

Yet the Coutts men — three of whom have no criminal record — have been held without bail for nearly 600 days. Since they are legally innocent until proven guilty, this is horrifying.

As Gord writes in Newsweek, we are a country in which hard-working Canadians are called Nazis by the same Prime Minister whose government recently recognized an actual Nazi with a standing ovation in the House of Commons. What a strange state of affairs.

After speaking to each of the Coutts four, Gord provides a wealth of new info about them. These are working class guys — a power lineman, the owner of a small construction company, a master electrician, and a contractor. Three of them have children as young as 9, 10, and 11. Gord says only two of them “knew each other prior to their arrest”. It’s difficult to imagine a more unlikely group of cop-murder conspiracists.

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