Quotulatiousness

January 9, 2024

“[P]olitical violence is never ever acceptable in the United States political system”

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

Mark Steyn gets the message:

~I’m glad to see I wasn’t the only one who got a mordant laugh out of this line in Joe Biden’s Feast of the Insurrection sermon:

So “political violence is never ever acceptable in the United States political system. Never, never, never. It has no place in a democracy. None.”

An odd thing to say about a “political system” in which Lieutenant Michael Byrd was able to kill Ashli Babbitt in cold blood as his Capitol Police colleagues were able to do likewise to another defenceless woman, Mariam Carey. I would hope to be wrong, but I would be surprised if America gets through this year without more “political violence” — because one side seems to be fomenting it as a pretext for intensifying what Mr Kelly calls their “monopoly” on it.

That monopoly is part of a broader problem in the United States: the abolition of equality before the law. If you can avoid getting dispatched as swiftly as Ms Babbitt, you will nevertheless have what remains of your life ruined by detention without trial, solitary confinement, double-digit years of prison with no possibility of parole … Americans have gotten the message. Do you recall, after the Canadian truckers’ heroic Covid protests inspired the world, there was talk of a similar American Freedom Convoy?

Oh, you don’t remember? Me neither. That’s because it all fizzled out, as its proponents figured that the dirty stinkin’ rotten corrupt US Department of Justice would just treat it as January 6th on wheels.

~Of course, it didn’t work out too great for the Canadian truckers, either: Frozen bank accounts, protracted prosecution … Small potatoes by US DOJ standards, and Lieutenant Byrd wasn’t around to shoot them dead, but it has certainly been fierce and targeted by Canadian standards. Why? Because in Ottawa the “traffic disruption impacted residents’ lives in many ways”.

On the other hand, “pro-Palestinian” groups are currently disrupting traffic in Toronto. For over a week they’ve shut down the Avenue Road bridge over the 401. Why?

Well, it’s a key artery into Toronto’s and Canada’s most Jewish neighbourhood. But, relax: they’re not anti-Jew, they’re just anti-Zionist. After all, many of these Jews in Armour Heights and Bathurst Manor are out every night bombing Gaza daycare centres. It’s part of the same expansive definition of “pro-Palestinian” that has seen International Delicatessen Foods attacked because it has the same acronym as the Israeli Defence Force. But don’t worry, they’re not anti-Semites, just acro-Semites. If I were the famous Japanese tea master Takeno Jōō, I would hire additional security. But fortunately he died in 1555 …

Yet, as I said, it all comes down to equality before the law. The Canadian truckers handed out coffee and doughnuts to locals and are still in the dock two years on. Whereas on the blockaded Avenue Road overpass the Toronto Police deliver coffee and doughnuts to the pro-Hamas lads:

Roll up the Jews to win! In the old days, the German coppers pleaded that they were just obeying orders, but, as Kate MacMillan points out, the Toronto constables are just taking orders. Did you hear the way that fellow put it? “The police are now becoming our little messengers.”

November 23, 2023

A .22LR Berthier for the French National Police (CRS)

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Jun 2022

In 1954, the Unique company (MAPF) in Hendaye France rebuilt a batch of 800 Berthier carbines into .22LR caliber for use by the Sûreté Nationale (later renamed the Police Nationale). These were to be used for training and also issued to prison guards. Both 1892 and 1916 pattern carbines were used, and so the CRS .22s can be found both with and without upper handguards. They were fitted with 5-round magazines from one of Unique’s pistol models. The change of the firing system from centerfire to rimfire was rather cleverly done, with the new barrels bored at a slight angle to obviate the need to change the firing pin geometry. This did require shaving down the cocking piece and changing the sights, however.
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October 1, 2023

MGD PM9 Rotary-Action Submachine Gun

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 May 2017

The PM9 was an interesting an unique submachine gun designed by Louis Debuit for the French firm Merlin and Gerin (hence the MGD name – Merlin, Gerin, Debuit) in the late 1940s and early 50s. The design was intended to provide a very compact package, which it did with a very short action, folding stock, and folding magazine.

The PM9 uses a delayed blowback action, and the delaying is done by a rotating flywheel-type block and clock spring. The bolt and flywheel act somewhat like the piston and crank in an engine. As the bolt (piston) moved rearward in a straight line, it forces the flywheel (crank) to rotate because the two are connected. In the case of the PM9, the connection is a nub on the flywheel that rides in a vertical slot in the bolt. The flywheel is pushing against the clock spring to rotate, and the combination of the its inertia and spring pressure keep the bolt closed long enough for pressure to drop to a safe level. The rotary action allows this to be done in a much smaller package than typical submachine guns.

The PM9 was initially chambered for 7.65 French Long, but quickly changed to standard 9mm Parabellum for the production models. It used the same magazine as the German MP38/MP40, giving it a 32-round capacity. In addition to the model with a skeletonized folding stock, the PM9 was also available with a fixed wooden stock and either short barrel of long carbine barrel. A relatively small number of guns were produced in France in 1954 and 1955, but they failed to find commercial success. In 1956 the German Erma company acquired a license to build the PM9, but abandoned the idea after making a few prototypes.
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July 18, 2023

Manville Gas Gun

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Oct 2012

Charles Manville developed this weapon in the 1930s as a riot control tool, and they were built in 12ga, 25mm, and 37mm. We should point out that the 12ga version was for tear gas rounds only (like today’s 12ga flare launchers) and not safe to use with high-pressure ammunition. Anyway, it was intended for use by prison guards and riot police, offering a much greater ammunition capacity than any other contemporary launcher.

During World War II, Manville tried to sell the military on a high-pressure version to fire 37mm explosive rounds, but was unsuccessful. Instead, the Manville company spent the was making parts for the Oerlikon 20mm AA guns, and the tooling for the gas launcher was all destroyed.
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July 15, 2023

The French Intifada

Filed under: Africa, France, Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ed West on the origins of the rising violence in French towns and cities:

I ran an image search for “Paris rioting” and there was a plentiful supply of fiery, eye-catching photos. Not all of these are from the most recent outbreak of violence, but they are certainly representative of how the legacy media is covering the situation.

The recent violence in Paris and elsewhere, which saw attempts to ram the home of a mayor, once again highlighted the trouble the country has with integration. But the French police union describing themselves as being “at war with vermin” illustrated the different mindset to the English-speaking world, and the far more belligerent approach to the problems of diversity.

Like Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, France has had difficulties assimilating the children of immigrants from beyond Europe, yet its recent history has proved especially violent and troubled. Britain has jihadi terrorism – 2017 was especially grim – but it has never reached such intensity. Today, as over 130,000 police officers stand guard to protect the Republic on the day of its celebration, it is worth considering the journey that brought it to such a state.

Analysts have often compared Britain’s state multiculturalism with France’s system of laïcité, which tends to downplay the existence of “communities” even to the point of not taking demographic statistics. Although neither country’s approach has entirely been a success, France’s refusal to recognise immigrants as anything but French has often been blamed for the widespread sense of alienation.

Others point to the housing system, which tends towards concentrations of North and West Africans in suburban banlieues, or the less laissez-faire economic policy which results in higher unemployment (in exchange for better social security).

While they no doubt play a part, the biggest single difference is history, as Andrew Hussey recounted back in 2014 in The French Intifada, in particular France’s history with North Africa. To put it in British terms, imagine that Britain’s rule in Pakistan had involved not a small number of administrators and soldiers but instead hundreds of thousands of British settlers arriving in the country, many with the intention of making it a “new America” (i.e. driving the natives out).

That Britain had declared Pakistan an integral part of the country, and that, rather than scarpering in indecent haste when the empire began to disintegrate, Britain had dug in to preserve its rule in a sadistic war of independence, one in which natives and white settlers committed countless atrocities against each other.

And that this violence had spilled into Britain with assassination attempts and terrorism, by both sides, destabilising the country to the point where there was talk of a coup. And that this was happening just as large-scale immigration to the colonial power was taking place.

Britain experienced nothing like as much violence in the dying days of empire, and indeed the only real comparison with our history was the moment when there was almost all-out conflict between Britain’s Protestant and Irish Catholic populations before the First World War.

If French politicians so casually talk of “civil war” between its right wing and the Algerian-descended population, it is because it has already played out this conflict before – one that was never healed, and so invites a sequel.

June 5, 2023

The poster child for truly antisocial behaviour

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

Not following the news closely, I don’t think I’d heard of “Mizzy” until perhaps a week or two back, but if he’d tried pulling this kind of behaviour in the US, his career would likely have been a lot shorter and much more violent:

Screen capture from a YouTube video

What’s the big deal about Mizzy? Surely one idiot 18 year old doesn’t merit the full glare of the British media, you may be thinking (at least if you haven’t been paying attention). Certainly the Guardian didn’t seem to think so — lagging two days behind reporting of the story in the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Independent and BBC. We at the Critic were kind enough to point this out and the Guardian have since seen fit to lower themselves to the story — an unhelpful distraction no doubt from more serious stories their exhaustive coverage of Philip Schofield’s departure from British breakfast TV.

One reason to care, is that despite claims to be a mere prankster, Mizzy’s actions are profoundly serious, terrifying to his victims, and suggest an escalating pattern of behaviour that could very plausibly lead to greater crimes. In a series of videos clearly intended to menace his targets, he decided to steal a dog from an old lady, burst into the home of a young family, and, in one truly shocking incident, comes up to a woman alone at night and asks her if she wants to die. It’s obvious, taken together, that these incidents are not pranks taken too far, but deliberate and calculated attempts to terrify and intimidate innocent people, often women, children or the elderly.

Anyone who has been subject to what we often euphemistically call “anti-social behaviour” and middle class columnists like to frame as teenagers with “too little to do” (blame the closed youth centre or something), knows all too well what Mizzy is up to. It’s the local drug addict who always follows you late at night, leering. It’s the teenagers who let their pitbull bark and snarl at you, smirking all the while. It’s the men who sit outside your house drinking, and stare at you as you walk down the road. Men and boys who take pleasure in the fear of others, often to compensate for absences in their own life — a job, a father, a girlfriend, a future. And sometimes the absence has no obvious explanation — there’s just something missing inside, a hole that demands to be filled, an appetite for brutality and cruelty muzzled but not tamed by modern society.

So what’s so special about Mizzy? He’s got a TikTok channel, on which he proudly posts these petty acts of barbarity for the pleasure of his thousands of followers. And this fact tells a story, an important story, about both the present and future of British society.

In the present, it’s a tale of an unpoliced and anti-social public realm; an increasingly familiar and despairing story of police and judicial passivity in the face of open criminality. Under Blair we reclassified petty crime as “anti-social behaviour” and instead of prison, or a suspended sentence and an ankle monitor, judges handed down things along the lines of “you must not be in the East Shield shopping centre after 10pm”. ASBO recipients, having been briefly hauled up, generally swiftly resume their trajectory towards criminality, creating more victims in the process.

Mizzy, having spent months openly terrorising people, was, amidst national attention and outrage, given the successor to the ASBO — a CBO (Criminal Behaviour Order). Shortly after appearing on national TV and complaining that he was the victim of racism, and only two days after receiving his CBO, Mizzy had already breached its terms, having posted yet more videos.

So much for the present — but what does the tiresome tale of narcissism and cruelty tell us about our future? Nothing good. Mizzy has blended street thuggery with online harassment, creating entertainment out of fear and pain. He’s part of a new flamboyant and triumphalist form of bullying and criminality, which finds an enthusiastic audience online.

Joe Baron instantly recognized Mizzy’s type from his own experiences as a teacher:

Piers Morgan is right. Mizzy is a moron. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, “Mizzy” is 18-year-old Bacari-Bronze O’Garro, who attracts followers on TikTok by filming himself engaged in criminal activity. He terrifies families by invading their homes, steals the dogs of elderly women, physically assaults unsuspecting commuters, and threateningly asks random people if they’d like to die.

[…]

As a teacher I recognised him immediately. So many youngsters betray the same peculiarities: entitled, self-satisfied and utterly irresponsible.

Why are these traits so commonplace among our young people? There are several reasons, bad parenting being the most notable. Either through fear or convenience, parents no longer discipline their children. If a teacher attempts to do so, the parents often complain, presumably in a bid to appease their volatile offspring and maintain a quiet life at home.

This month, I had a furious encounter with a parent who could only be described as deranged. My crime: issuing her daughter with a 30-minute detention for forgetting her exercise book. In an earlier incident, another parent physically assaulted a colleague, attempting to strangle him for disciplining his daughter. She had slapped a book out of his hand during classroom changeover. Anxious and stressed, my colleague left the school soon after, and several weeks later, his attacker’s daughter viciously assaulted another pupil, who then needed hospital treatment.

Parents also have to take responsibility for the devastating effects of divorce on their children. Nearly half of all marriages end in failure. That’s a huge number of broken homes and broken children. And it often leads to poor behaviour. Fecklessness begets fecklessness. When will we wake up to this reality and encourage prospective parents to take their vows more seriously? That’s if there is a marriage in the first place. Or even a father present in the home.

Furthermore, adults have surrendered their authority to children. For example, recalcitrant pupils are not effectively disciplined because, contrary to the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, children are now seen as pure, infallible and morally unimpeachable, and adults as iniquitous and corrupting influences. Consequently, a child’s misbehaviour must be the fault of the adult or teacher. In addition, if a child should make a statement concerning an incident, and the statement contradicts his or her teacher’s version of events, the child’s claims must take precedence, even if they’re completely bogus.

May 29, 2023

“I’m starting to think that Just Stop Oil is a Big Oil plant”

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

Tom Slater on the amazing tone-deafness of the Just Stop Oil “activists”:

“Just Stop Oil Courtauld Gallery 30062022” by Just Stop Oil is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

I’m starting to think that Just Stop Oil is a Big Oil plant. What else could explain these campaigners’ phenomenal ability to turn the public against them and confirm their critics’ worst prejudices. Namely, that this environmental activism / amdram troupe is stuffed with upper-middle-class irritants who couldn’t give a damn about working-class people. Surely, this has got to be on purpose?

Take their recent “slow marches” through London, aimed at bringing traffic to a standstill. The whole point of these stunts seems to be to force cab drivers, delivery men and builders to sit in traffic so that these protesters can preach their miserable little gospel. And as Edred Whittingham‘s (don’t laugh) deranged antics at the Crucible recently showed us, you now can’t even escape these bourgeois millenarians during your leisure time.

That this new generation of environmentalists are almost uniformly posh is an established empirical fact. An academic survey of those involved in Extinction Rebellion – the mothership organisation from which Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain were spawned – found, to the surprise of precisely no one, that they were overwhelmingly middle class, highly educated and from the south. A full 85 per cent of them have some form of university degree.

So what we have here is the comfortably off classes – those with sufficient free time to glue themselves to roads on a Wednesday mid-morning – forcing their weird hangups on everyone else. Time and again, when they are criticised for making people’s lives a misery, they offer only patronising lectures. “We’re so sorry that we have to disrupt the lives of ordinary people”, said Just Stop Oil’s Eben Lazarus (I know) to Vice last year, but “hopefully people will see, further down the line, that the disruption we’re causing is microscopic compared to the disruption that we’re going to face because of the climate crisis”. Translation: we know better, you cretins.

No wonder that so many now respond to these cunning stunts with instant, visceral fury. First there was the Battle of Canning Town in 2019, when east-London commuters pulled two Extinction Rebellion people down from the top of a Tube train. And as police have failed to deal with these protests – they now seem to escort rather than stop these “slow marches” – motorists have increasingly decided to take matters into their own hands. Several clips of workers clashing – sometimes physically – with Just Stop Oil activists have gone viral in the past week alone, including one of a man shoving JSOers on Blackfriars Bridge, before promptly being arrested.

May 16, 2023

Hope for sensible reform to US Civil Asset Forfeiture?

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille on the latest bipartisan attempt to at least somewhat rein in the Civil Asset Forfeiture abuse allowed under current rules:

Years after “civil asset forfeiture” became synonymous in many minds with legalized theft, the practice of seizing money and property merely suspected of a connection to a crime remains a boil on the ass of American jurisprudence. Now, in a rare demonstration of cooperation across political divides, Democratic and Republican lawmakers have joined together to introduce legislation to reform the practice of civil forfeiture at the federal level. They are supported by a coalition of organizations that put aside ideological differences in an attempt to curb the dangerous practice. As encouraging as the bill’s prospects appear, that this is not the first attempt to pass this legislation underlines the challenge of correcting government abuses.

“Today, U.S. Representatives Tim Walberg (R-MI) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD) reintroduced the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act (FAIR Act), a comprehensive reform to our nation’s civil asset forfeiture laws,” the two lawmakers announced in March. “The FAIR Act raises the level of proof necessary for the federal government to seize property, reforms the IRS structuring statute to protect innocent small business owners, and increases transparency and congressional oversight.”

The FAIR Act sets a higher bar for seizing private property, but still allows for civil forfeiture in the absence of a criminal conviction. The legislation requires:

“If the Government’s theory of forfeiture is that the property was used to commit or facilitate the commission of a criminal offense, or was involved in the commission of a criminal offense, the Government shall establish, by clear and convincing evidence, that … there was a substantial connection between the property and the offense; and the owner of any interest in the seized property — (i) used the property with intent to facilitate the offense; or knowingly consented or was willfully blind to the use of the property by another in connection with the offense.”

The bill requires that seizures be conducted in court rather than through administrative processes and also guarantees legal representation for federal forfeiture targets.

The FAIR Act isn’t a perfect bill. Many reformers will object that forfeiture should require the criminal conviction of the person whose money and property is being taken. Draining somebody’s bank account and nabbing their car keys may not be as dramatic as throwing them in a prison cell, but it’s a harsh punishment all the same and should require full due process. Still, some improvement is better than none for a practice that has largely served as an exercise in legalized highway robbery.

April 5, 2023

The fate of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after the Mass Casualty Commission report

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In her new Substack, Tasha Kheiriddin considers what should be done with the RCMP in the wake of the Mass Casualty Commision’s report on, among other things, the cultural and structural problems within the force that contributed to the death toll in Portapique:

The first thing the federal government should do is break up the RCMP. It should give local policing contracts to provincial and regional police and focus a new national force solely on national policing.

Former RCMP officer Garry Clement, author of the forthcoming book Under Cover: Inside the Shady World of Organized Crime and the RCMP, gives a blunt assessment of the situation. In an email to In My Opinion, he stated that “The RCMP has two choices: 1) relinquish contracts and focus on their federal mandates; or 2) maintain contracts but create a ‘Firewall’ between both areas and enable the federal side to have permanent resources in their wheelhouse with their own metrics for salaries.”

Considering how the force is currently structured, a financial firewall won’t be enough to ensure adequate delivery of both mandates. It is unreasonable to expect a national force to deliver community policing at the standards expected in the 21st century. Vice versa, it is also unreasonable for officers who cut their teeth in remote communities to go on to tackle big city, national and international criminal matters.

One of the main recommendations of the Mass Casualty Report is that the federal public safety minister commission an independent review of the RCMP and examine the force’s approach to contract policing. But some believe they should act now, and leave local policing to local police.

Todd Hataley is a professor in the School of Justice and Community Development at Fleming College and a retired member of the RCMP, where he worked as an investigator in organized crime, national security, cross-border crime and extra-territorial torture. He offered these thoughts on a Teams call the day after the report came out.

    The RCMP is currently structured with a paramilitary, top-down approach, making it difficult to retrain middle management. It is a paramilitary structure that doesn’t work for modern policing, where you need partnerships for mental health, where you need to get ahead of problems.

Local policing needs to be responsive to local demands,” continued Hataley. This is particularly true of indigenous communities. “There’s a good body of research that shows that indigenous officers use less force, about one tenth that of non-indigenous officers. In my experience, service is better when less force is used. There are better relations with the community.”

Some communities have already cut ties due to this lack of community engagement. Last December the town council of Surrey, BC, ended its contract with the RCMP, even though it will cost more to hire local police. It cited the growth of a large South Asian community in the area and the fact that the RCMP’s structure did not facilitate development of an adequate relationship.

Interviewed in the Toronto Star about this issue earlier this year, Curt Griffiths, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University in B.C., echoed that assessment. “RCMP officers — and it’s not their fault; it’s the way the system’s set up — they’re just passing through,” he said. “There’s a cost to that in terms of community policing, community engagement, knowledge of the community.”

Similarly, in March of 2023 the Alberta community of Grande Prairie voted to create a municipal police service. Councilor Gladys Blackmore told CTV News that training issues were one of the reasons. “I’m frustrated by the fact that 40 out of our 97 officers have come directly to us from Depot, and that means they are inexperienced, and they still require a significant amount of training, which the RCMP chooses to send them away for.”

March 4, 2023

Thompson SMG Cases: Police, FBI, and Secret Service

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Nov 2022

The Auto Ordnance company made a couple of different types of cases for the Thompson SMG, and today we are going to look at two of the most common and one exceptionally cool type. The two most typically found are the Police and FBI cases. Both of these hold the gun along with the detached stock, one drum, and four box magazines. The Police type has the drum and box mags separated for balance and was lined with purple velvet; the FBI case was generally blue velvet and had all the magazines on the left (making it balance poorly).

The other case we have today is one fabricated by the Secret Service for one of its protective details. This is a flat-lying wooden case, which holds the gun, stock, and four box magazines — no drums for the Service.
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March 3, 2023

Progressives have steadily transitioned to the movement that denies that any personal conduct rules should apply

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

Freddie deBoer challenges his fellow leftists to identify who were the theorists that introduced the notion that personal responsibility is an anti-socialist position:

The woman whose account appears at the top of this picture started a Twitter storm, somehow, by publicly wishing that she could take her child onto the subway without exposing them to secondhand smoke. She was beset by a certain online species of ostensible leftist who is against ever trying to enforce any kind of rule, anywhere, ever. See, rules are the hand of oppression, or something, and since most of society’s rules are meant to be enforced by the police, trying to enforce them (merely wishing that they be enforced) is an endorsement of the police and their violence …

I find this attitude has become inescapable. It’s not just the attitude that the enforcement of societal rules and norms is bad, but that this is the default assumption of all right-thinking people — it’s not just a left-wing perspective but the left-wing perspective. Like so much else in contemporary left-of-center discourse, it demonstrates the total ideological poverty we’re working with. Nobody has read anything, so nobody knows anything, so you’re constantly getting yelled at by self-described radicals who have no solid footing in any systematic approach to left politics at all. Like I said before, we’re living in definitional collapse; the struggle right now is not merely that socialism can’t win but that so many self-described socialists have no deeper ideological moorings than whatever they’ve absorbed from Tumblr and “breadtube”. They think that to be a socialist means to disdain all rules because there is no substance to their socialism at all.

Chris Hayes considered the subway smoking problem last year.

Conceptually, I don’t think these problems are hard at all: the left, the socialist left, has never advocated for a system in which there are literally no expectations on personal behavior. It’s quite bizarre to suggest that this was ever a thing! Only certain extreme forms of anarchism have ever implied that society should have no rules. Go back through the history of socialist theorists and number all of the ones who believed that there should be no laws and no police to enforce them. You won’t find many! Instead you’ll find people who believed in the need for both laws that govern human behavior and constabulary forces to enforce those laws. That’s the solution to the conundrum, my friends — you have rules and you have police that enforce those rules. The belief, and the hope, is that a socialist society is one with far less need for aggressive policing, thanks to far greater economic equality, and maybe someday, after the end of material need, we can consider a policeless society. But not having any social rules or people who enforce those rules is not a socialist concept and never has been. What I would ask Chris Hayes and people like him is … what is the leftist tradition that you’re drawing from that implies that there should be no enforcement of behavioral norms? What thinker? What book? What philosophy? Or, could it be that you’ve developed this totally substance-free approach to basic order because you’ve been habituated to talking this way through exposure to people on social media who know nothing about anything in particular?

Of course, there’s big problems with American policing. Very big problems indeed. So what we do is reform policing. (I address this at length in my next book, coming this fall from Simon & Schuster.) Alternatively, if you’re really committed to this “no rules, no enforcement” thing, you become an anarchist of a very particular stripe — most versions of anarchism have both rules and enforcement mechanisms for them — and you and your compatriots can try to change the system. All twelve of you. In the house your wealthy parents bought for you.

March 1, 2023

If the Freedom Convoy “actually was what it has often been portrayed as on social media — a horde of thousands of literal Nazis and Confederates set on violently overthrowing our democratically elected government — then [we’d] be living in the Confederate Republic of Nazi Canada by now”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains how going through Justice Paul Rouleau’s Public Order Emergency Commission report in detail leads to some uncomfortable realizations about Canadian goverment and policing — at all three levels — failed to meet minimal expectations of competency and capacity:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The convoy crisis — and I’m mostly speaking here about the events in Ottawa, though the situation at the border crossings fit the same general pattern — forced Canadian police and political leaders to respond quickly to evolving circumstances. And Rouleau’s report is just a relentlessly brutal catalogue of the ways they failed.

Is it really necessary at this point to recap the failure of the Ottawa police? We at The Line have long maintained that the complete failure of the Ottawa police to plan for and control the protest not only allowed the convoy to entrench itself, but also established the psychological paradigm that would define the crisis for weeks: the convoyers held the initiative (not to mention the capital) and the Canadian state was befuddled and adrift. From that, a national crisis was born. Rouleau is just devastating. “The OPS [Ottawa Police Service]’s planning challenges,” he notes on page 56 of the first volume, “were compounded by a general breakdown of command and control.” Super.

He’s even more brutal on page 185 of the second volume: “The influx of Freedom Convoy vehicles and the disruptive behaviour by some protesters threw the OPS operational command at the NCRCC [a command centre] into a state of dysfunction. OPS Inspector Lucas described the atmosphere at the NCRCC as chaotic and explained that he and his team had neither the capacity to process the incoming information nor the resources to respond to the needs it was facing. In the late afternoon of January 29, the OPP’s [Ontario Provincial Police] representative at the NCRCC, Inspector Dawn Ferguson, reported to OPP Superintendent Abrams that OPS members in the NCRCC were panicked and were swearing and yelling orders at each other and at partner agencies.”

Huh.

Moving up a level of government, much has already been written about the cowardice of the Ford government. If any agency performed semi-well, it was the Ontario Provincial Police. The OPP was the force that was generating most of the critical intelligence used (or ignored) during the crisis. It was quick to realize that command-and-control had collapsed in Ottawa (see above), and to begin working with the RCMP on a plan — eventually a series of plans — to restore order. You can’t read POEC and conclude the OPP performed perfectly. Far from it. It was probably the best we had, though, but because Ford took a gander at the mess in Ottawa and decided to mosey on off to the cottage, it couldn’t do much.

Huh.

And that leaves us with the feds. I have maintained since last year that the federal government hasn’t received nearly enough attention in our understanding of what the hell went wrong last year. This has caused a fair degree of pushback, especially from Liberal supporters who read any reference to the “federal government” as “our beloved prime minister”. But no — while I don’t think the prime minister or the federal cabinet did particularly well during the crisis, the real federal failures were in the officials that supported the PM and his ministers.

Among the many other failures, the inability of the various government and police organizations to organize and properly share the information they were handling is perhaps the most disturbing:

If you want to see it yourself, check out pages 38 and 39 of the third volume. For those in a hurry, though, it turns out that even within the government, the flow of information was so bad that the clerk of the privy council, and the prime minister, noted that staff were learning about the convoy not via internal reports, but social media. The federal government had, as Juneau and Rigby have noted, “intelligence gaps” that “hampered the government’s ability to understand, anticipate, and respond to the situation, and to reconcile conflicting information such as contradictory reports about the size of the convoy”. The federal government didn’t have the software to process and analyze online posts, even public ones.

And then there was this (my emphasis added):

    [National Security and Intelligence Advisor] Thomas also described an information-sharing gap between law enforcement and government. Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet, Security and Intelligence, Michael MacDonald recalled a significant delay in receiving updates from the RCMP, due to the RCMP’s obligation to consult with each intelligence agency that has provided the RCMP with information prior to sharing that information further (known as the “third party rule”). The NSIA’s office did not receive situation reports, project reports, or other forms of information, such as Project Hendon reports, that the RCMP obtained from other law enforcement agencies. Prior to the events of the convoy, the NSIA was not aware of Project Hendon. …

    NSIA Thomas further stated that it was sometimes difficult to know how to interact with law enforcement agencies. She recognized that government must not interfere in operational matters, but thought that there was nonetheless useful information that could have been provided to decision makers without encroaching upon police independence. However, senior officials were uncertain how to obtain that information, and were concerned about “crossing the line” both in requesting information and in discussing solutions.

… huh.

And that doesn’t even cover our now-outgoing national commissioner of the RCMP being so clueless she decided to just not mention germane information during a critical meeting because … well, we never really got a good explanation for that one. Oh well. Enjoy your retirement, Commissioner Lucki!

February 13, 2023

Reising M55 Submachine Gun

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Sept 2015

When the US entered WWII, submachine guns were in short supply and high demand. Much of the production of Thompson guns was being purchased by the UK, and what guns were available to the US military went first to the Army. In accordance with long tradition, the Marine Corps were secondary to the Army in receiving new weapons. However, the formation of a Marine paratroop unit in particular necessitated the Corps finding some sort of suitable submachine gun.

What was available at the time were Eugene Reising’s M50 and M55 guns, being manufactured by Harrington & Richardson. The guns were chambered for the standard .45ACP cartridge and used a delayed blowback action which allowed them to be significantly lighter than the Thompson. The M50 had a full-length traditional stock, while the M55 used a pistol grip and wire folding stock. Mechanically, the two variants were identical. The M55, which is what we have today, wound up being specifically issued to tank crews and paratroops, where its compactness was a significant advantage.

The Reising developed a quite bad reputation in the Pacific for a couple of reasons. Its parts were not always interchangeable between guns (a deliberate choice to speed up manufacture, which troops were not necessarily aware of), its mechanism was more susceptible to fouling than other military small arms, and its disassembly procedure was far too complex for military service. However, these issues did not prevent it from being quite successful and well-liked as a law enforcement weapon in civilian police use after the war. Thanks to that negative wartime reputation, Reisings are some of the least expensive military machine guns available on the market today in the US.
(more…)

February 5, 2023

“[E]very story now assumes ‘white supremacy’ as the core truth of the world”

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

Andrew Sullivan on the state of the American legacy media in an age of young, woke reporters driving the narrative forward at the expense of any hint of objectivity:

Memphis police officers charged in the beating death of Tyre Nichols.

There are times when I actually feel some pity for the editors in mainstream media. In the last few years, pressured relentlessly by young, super-leftist staffers, they have slowly and then precipitously dropped the goal of objectivity and news in favor of subjectivity and narratives. The struggle against white supremacy has become too urgent for news that may not advance “social justice”. Here’s a glimpse of what the old guard is dealing with, in a leaked transcript of a NYT staff meeting in 2019. An early question from a NYT reporter was:

    I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? … I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.

And, as you can see every day, this is what the NYT subsequently did. Distilled that year with The 1619 Project (now airing on Hulu!), everything was and is parsed through the lens of critical race/gender/queer theory — from birdwatching to knitting to “literally abolishing the police”. It’s their foundation.

The same ideological fervor swept over the WaPo, of course — right down to the racist birds! And this week, the former executive editor, Len Downie, a near-icon of the old school, published a report on journalism and found a broad consensus among his colleagues that, in the words of one editor-in-chief, “Objectivity has got to go!” So every story now assumes “white supremacy” as the core truth of the world.

So what happens when stories arrive which, on the face of it, seem to refute that entirely? Take three recent events: two mass killings of Asian-Americans within two days in California by an Asian-American (in Monterey Park) and a Chinese national (in Half Moon Bay); five black police officers in a majority-black police force with a black police chief all but lynched and murdered an innocent black man; and a trans woman was convicted of the rape of two other women with the use of her penis.

How on earth do these fit into the pre-arranged “white supremacy” template?

They can’t of course. They reflect a reality far more complex than the crude racial hierarchies beloved of actual white supremacists and woke activists alike. They show individual actors, with a range of possible motives, in unique moments that will always escape predictable narratives. Maybe racial prejudice is present; maybe not; or maybe mixed into a range of other possible factors. You work empirically from the ground up.

But if the facts don’t fit the narrative, you move on quickly to a story that will. So with the Asian-American massacres, after some initial excitement, the MSM lost interest as soon as a white man could not be blamed. (Contrast that with the days-long feeding frenzy over the Atlanta spa massacre, despite zero evidence of any anti-Asian motive from the white killer.) Or they try to force it into their narrative anyway.

January 22, 2023

One year later

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last year, the Freedom Convoy 2022 from all parts of Canada began to assemble and move toward Mordor, er, I mean Ottawa. Patrick Carroll remembers:

It’s hard to believe, but the one-year anniversary of the Canadian Freedom Convoy is upon us. It was January 22, 2022 when the convoy began to form across the country. Over the following week, thousands of trucks made their way to Ottawa, and on January 29 they arrived in the nation’s capital, loud and determined as ever.

The following month was one of the most tumultuous times in modern Canadian history. Downtown Ottawa was completely gridlocked, bridges were blocked, and politicians along with the media took every opportunity to smear the protesters.

Four weeks later, it ended quite a bit faster than most people expected. Armed with special powers from the never-before-invoked Emergencies Act, the government successfully dismantled the protest in a matter of days.

In hindsight, the practical effect of the protest on legislation is difficult to detect. Some Covid policies were probably relaxed a few months earlier than they otherwise would have been, but for the Convoy organizers, this was far from a decisive victory.

A debate has been raging in Canada ever since: were the protestors within their rights to do what they did? Those who support the convoy argue that they were, since the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly. Those who oppose the convoy largely agree with these freedoms, but argue that such freedoms should be subject to certain reasonable restrictions. Major obstructions to traffic, and especially obstructions to critical infrastructure such as bridges, are simply going too far in their view. Is the government supposed to stand by and let a group of hooligans bring the country to its knees?

That’s certainly the line the governments (city, provincial, and federal) generally chose to take and the media were almost chanting the governments’ line in unison. Of course, the governments were not all that well synchronized, which led to some blatant examples of deliberate misinformation/disinformation/gaslighting from one or another level, as Donna Laframboise points out:

During the inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act, witnesses talked about misinformation as if it were a problem confined to contrarians on social media. But the Closing Submission of former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly shows that government officials are, themselves, a fertile source of misinformation.

If someone in our federal government had demonstrated genuine leadership by going out and talking to the truckers, the protesters would likely have dispersed after the first weekend. Instead, a government that meets with professional lobbyists on 24,000 occasions a year refused to have a single meeting with working people who’d driven thousands of miles to the nation’s capital. Rather than being a grownup, the Prime Minister called them names. Rather than negotiating with the protesters, he told police to get rid of them.

According to Chief Sloly, the Ottawa force was understaffed at the best of times. Even after cancelling vacations and days off, there still weren’t enough personnel to deal with a significant, extended protest on top of normal duties.

From the beginning, the media failed to behave responsibly. It whipped up hysteria. It smeared and sneered. It sowed suspicion and fear of small town Canada, of those who see the world differently, of people who’d reached their breaking point. Big surprise a portion of the public did, in fact, become hysterical. As the protest dragged on, the pressure became intense. In lieu of pursuing a political resolution to what were clearly political grievances, slimy politicians pointed fingers at the Ottawa police. While simultaneously hamstringing them behind the scenes.

Page 43 of Chief Sloly’s Closing Submission says federal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino falsely told the world — on February 3rd — that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had provided all the resources the Ottawa police had asked for. Four days later — on February 7th — he insisted 250 RCMP officers had been dispatched to Ottawa.

But the reality was quite different. Until mid-February, say his lawyers, the maximum number of RCMP officers available to the Ottawa force on any given day was 60 — far less than the number required.

It was the same story with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). On February 6th, Ontario’s Solicitor General Sylvia Jones falsely stated in an official document that “more than 1,500” OPP personnel had already been sent to Ottawa. In the words of Chief Sloly’s lawyers, this was “grossly inaccurate” (pages 80, 107).

Government ministers at both the provincial and federal level, they insist, made misleading statements about the degree of assistance Ottawa police had received. Statements that were “clearly incorrect” (page 53).

Which means Cabinet ministers were spreading misinformation. Misinformation that just happened to deflect blame away from themselves. That just happened to make the Ottawa Police Service look incompetent while turning the chief into a scapegoat. Ottawa’s first black police chief, a Jamaican immigrant, got thrown under the bus.

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